Frontman and main songwriter Greg Gonzalez talks of his love for cinematic works – a love that grew from his experience working at a theatre in Brooklyn. This love for cinema transposed into his band’s debut album and manifested into an aim to project something much larger than just music. It was an aim to build a multimedia piece of art, drawing together film and music to generate an emotional touchstone. Following his band’s breakout success in 2015 following the single ‘Affection’ and then the further unearthing of an earlier EP titled I., Gonzalez has strived to attain this goal in music – to build vivid imagery, evocative of deep emotion… love.

Explaining the purpose in the debut full length, Gonzalez explains: “This is like the novel or feature-length version of Cigarettes. I wanted it to feel like a complete work, where some of the imagery repeats – like it’s all in the same world. It’s very much a fulfilment of the feelings in the short works.” Musically the album flickers between the lush textures of Slowdive and Galaxie 500, as with the opener and recent single ‘K’, emphasising Gonzalez’s every word with swooning bass and glittering guitar sequences. 

Gonzalez’s aching passion for the romantic is what embodies much of the Cigarettes After Sex debut – even with the band’s title, the rich imagery associated with the scene of smoking ‘cigarettes after sex’ powerfully dictates imagery often found throughout cinema’s most heart-warming moments. The drifting nature of tracks such as ‘Each Time You Fall in Love’ and ‘Opera House’ conjure up sounds reminiscent of Mazzy Star and Chapterhouse – Gonzalez successfully delivers a vast updating of the shoegaze genre that has long been required.

This profound ability to generate emotion in music is found by occupying the space between sounds, from the gentle lilt of ‘Sunsetz’ with its soupy groove and Gonzalez’s whispering vocal through to the sparkling guitar of ‘Young & Dumb’. Gonzalez understands human feeling to a tee, from painstaking heartbreak to warm intimacy and fervent lust, he enlists himself as the contemporary auteur of love.

Gonzalez mostly balances his sore heart with maturity. Sidestepping lyrical cliche when playing Cupid can often be a tricky task and, although he occasionally falls victim, for the most part he offers an interesting insight that adds to his marrying of artistic mediums. ‘Apocalypse’ for example finds Gonzalez dictating movie scenes with the assertiveness of Linklater, “You leapt from crumbling bridges watching cityscapes turn to dust / Filming helicopters crashing in the ocean from way above.” Gonzalez’s way with vocabulary allows him to dash emotional paint upon his bruising musical pictures.

Occasionally Gonzalez warbles into the overly saccharine side of love though, as with the aforementioned track ‘Each Time You Fall in Love’ which poses as much cliche as Pizza Hut on a Friday night: “Each time you have a dream / You never know what it means / You see that open road and never know which way to go”. The constant yearning is certainly the mainstay of the record, but it’s the overemphasis of this that ironically becomes its Achilles heel at times. The woozy haze that embodies much of the album drags on at times. As you hit the tail end, tracks such as ‘Truly’ and ‘John Wayne’ become a little misguided but not because they are bad but because they have already been done eight times previously.

Gonzalez and Cigarettes After Sex have pieced together a warming bit of work here, as an album it perhaps grows slightly weary towards the end, but the intention that Gonzalez sets out with is executed perfectly time and time again. This won’t strike down as a classic or anything earth-shattering but what it does is update a genre that has long needed a new voice and perhaps this album sets Cigarettes After Sex a benchmark for future developments.
Tom Churchill

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