Cigarettes After Sex’s third album X’s is disappointing and bland.
Sex-filled and repetitious both in style and content, the band struggles to say anything that they haven’t already said before. The album begins with the uninspiring titular track. The idiosyncratic sound of slow plucked electric guitars and extensive reverb set the scene of a hazy bedroom filled with cigarette smoke rising above naked bodies – a setting the 10-song album rarely leaves. In “Tejano Blue”, the tempo, surprisingly, picks up. Unsurprisingly, the opening line, “We wanted to f*** with real love”, fails interest from the start, the rest of the song falling into the usual sexed-up feelings. Two songs in and Cigarettes After Sex continue to have the same central tenet in their music: being in love with the idea of being in love with a woman who has no clothes on.
The more the album continues, the more it is dripping with ennui, placed firmly in a Bret Easton Ellis world of young people doing nothing in the sweltering land of L.A., where young men are obsessed with the bodies of their girlfriends, where their shallowness has stripped away romance. “Holding you, holding me” only continues these images of sex; “Kissing forever”, Greg Gonzalez sings, never seeming to bore of the action and not caring if the listener has. Halfway through the album and each song is the same words puzzled together. It is a huge shame considering the lyricism of their first album, long gone are the days of “K” and “Apocalypse”, songs that had drama, songs that, ultimately, you could remember. The fact Gonzalez cites David Lynch films and The Cocteau Twins as major inspirations is hard to believe when listening to X’s – Cigarettes After Sex’s new album fails to create something nearly as mesmerising and hypnotic as either of these artists. Personally, I would like to throw a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a collection of twentieth century poetry at Greg Gonzalez. Luckily for the band, Gonzalez’s still beautiful tenor is hard to hear through the breathy reverb of the production, making the lyrics more indiscernible than before. Failing to imbue this album with lasting meaning, each song threatens to become an empty echo of itself.
By the time “Baby Blue Movie” rolls around, it is harder to believe anything that the singer feels is real. It doesn’t feel like the emotions of a 41-year-old. Instead, it has the fanciful love of a teenager where all the effort comes from the other side, where he swans around in his sexualised feelings. It is almost impossible to understand how X’s recounts the breakup of Gonzalez’s four-year relationship. Nothing in this album makes it seem like his love was very serious. “Hot” is rife with the feelings of a man who is unable to attach, only able to describe the taste of a woman’s lips and repeating how hot it is inside of her. Describing someone’s taste as summer and pink lemonade has been done before. Gonzalez sings “Is it all in my head?” I want to scream “Yes!”
The last two songs continue the sentiment of wanting love to last forever, using the same images of lips and wine and skin and prescription drugs. It is an album more aligned with feelings of wasted youth than heartbreak (and if, inexplicably, that was a concept for the album, it is one that has been poorly conceived). Cigarettes After Sex seemed to have reached the extent of what is possible with their pared back sound and increasingly unoriginal lyrics. It appears that they have finally run out of ways to sing about sex. They have trapped themselves in a niche of their own making and have made an album that is almost unbearable to listen to more than once.
Thankfully, it is completely forgettable.
4/10
