Review: Cigarettes After Sex's X's presents a stunning trip through raw, emotive storytelling set to entrancing pop melodies. Centered on a four-year relationship, the album delves deep into the complexities of love and loss, offering poignant and sometimes provocative vignettes. Greg Gonzalez's songwriting captures the essence of romantic emotions, creating a cinematic experience for listeners. Departing from their earlier influences, the band embraces a 70s/80s slow dance vibe, infusing their music with a disco-era melancholy that feels both nostalgic and contemporary. With its lush, dreamy soundscapes and introspective lyrics, X's will be another well received album from their catalogue. The cassette version adds a nostalgic touch to this already exciting listening experience.
Review: Cigarettes After Sex returns with their third album, X's, via Partisan Records, marking a departure from their previous influences and embracing pop touchstones of the 70s and 80s. Bandleader Greg Gonzalez delves into the intricacies of a four-year relationship, delivering raw and imagistic vignettes set to slowburn pop melodies. With brutal intensity, Gonzalez purges his emotions, centering the album on this singular romantic arc, infusing their music with dark yet burgeoning melodies. While retaining classic pop song structures, Cigarettes After Sex subtly evolves their sound, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of disco ball-refracted tears on the dance floor. X's presents a mesmerizing and emotionally resonant journey through the complexities of love and loss, the band's continued growth and maturity is on full display.
Review: Monochrome dream pop band Cigarettes After Sex release their third studio album X's, following up the pre-release 'Tejano Blue'. As romantic and wistful as ever, the album is an avowed haunt-jaunt through a series of 'slow-dance pop ballads' - no change there - albeit this time concerning the brutal reckoning with relationship breakdown and loss, personally borne by lead musician Greg Gonzalez during the recording of their prior self-titled album. Also a lover letter to Gonzalez' hometown of El Paso, Texas, the album draws on themes of the music scene and atmosphere of the city, in dialogue with a subsequent move to New York and the culture shock that followed.
Review: Cigarettes After Sex's X's is the dreamy indie pop band's third album, following 2019's Cry, and hears a wistful array of new songs drawing on the same palette as ever, but with nonetheless a newfound personal bent drawing on the breakdown of a relationship and a move between cities undergone by lead singer Greg Gonzales. With every influence from Texan blues and Tejano music - the likes of Selena, Los Angeles Azules and La Mafia - to esteemd dream poppers Cocteau Twins, this is a fresh new fusion from the hypnagogic hopeless-romantics, sure to sate existing fans and draw in new ones alike.
Review: Washed-out gothic dream-popstars Cigarettes After Sex deliver their latest album, X's, building on the now prolific body of work that has so far propelled the band's lead brain Greg Gonzalez to fame. Whereas prior projects under the CAS ambit have revolved around only isolated vignettes of a hazy and monochrome - but decidedly sexual - nature, X's is the band's first record concerning a single relationship: the pain of losing an LTR, in stark contrast the string of sonic flings that came before. Led by the careful straddling of romantic fantasy and grimmer, nicotine-stained realities on 'Dark Vacay', such is the overarching mood; of sex amounting to a futile attempt to overcome the end of loving communication, and cigarettes plugging the hole that arises from this.
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