Empty Country is Joseph D’Agostino from Cymbals Eat Guitars, who are now broken up. The album features some folks from the Philly/Jersey music scene, including D’Agostino’s wife, Rachel Browne, singer for Field Mouse, former Cymbals Eat Guitars drummer Anne Doyle, and Charles Bissell of the Wrens. The self-titled Empty Country album was supposed to be released by Tiny Engines, but it seems like that’s no longer the case, per this tweet from the CEG account.
Cymbals Eat Guitars were one of my favorite bands of the last five years. I didn’t discover them until “Lose,” which still feels to me like a kind of “Dubliners” for 90s/00s New Jersey/Southeastern Pennsylvania, a hyperspecific document of what it felt like to live in a certain place at a certain time. I’d heard songs here and there from “Why There Are Mountains” and “Lenses Alien” but never fully understood the band’s music until “Lose,” which made me backtrack through their catalog to listen to everything. “Pretty Years,” their last album, was also incredible, one of my favorites from 2016. They had a pretty fantastic run, but as D’Agostino said in an interview with Billboard, circumstances wore them down towards the end of touring in 2017.
“Ultrasound” is the first single from the Empty Country album, and D’Agostino discussed the origin of the song in a couple interviews. It’s about waiting for the results of a biopsy for his wife, Rachel, after a shadow showed up on an ultrasound imaging exam. Musically it’s reminiscent of some of CEG’s uptempo rockers, like “Warning” from “Lose” or “WELL” from “Pretty Years.” And lyrically it’s about feeling helpless when confronted with the possibility of losing the person you love most. It’s heartbreaking: “A baby grand hanging over my babyʼs head/In five business days/Weʼll know/Body horror/Never thought/Of all the things that could go wrong/We try to sleep/Weʼre spinning ‘round/A shadow on the ultrasound/I would never leave you darling/No/Wanna take this weight off of ya.” At the end of the song, there’s this: “Realized/The million things that all went right/To lead me here/Weʼre side by side/Letʼs leave this house/Letʼs take a ride,” which truly captures the feeling of being in awe of your luck at having met this person you love, and wanting so much to comfort them and keep them out of harm’s way.
[Check the CEG Twitter to see how and when the record will be released]