While many buzz-minded new artists dive straight into Brooklyn's bustling music scene, Cymbals Eat Guitars were happy fine-tuning tracks from the outside, looking in "first in elaborate demos with The Wrens' Charles Bissel (starting way back in the summer of 2007, before the group even had a name), and finally in a proper studio with Kyle "Slick" Johnson (Modest Mouse, The ives). Like many other early fans, Johnson inadvertently discovered Cymbals Eat Guitars on New York's Lower East Side circuit, playing the kind of early sets that come with being spread between Staten Island, Manhattan and Queens.

On a practical level, this has led the band to physically call the country's most popular record shops and ask them to carry Mountains' initial pressings. Lucky for them, the record sold itself, generating interest as far away as the UK's influential Rough Trade shop and the NME, who wrote, Why There Are Mountains may be one of the best 'indie' (the album is self-released, so, y'know, actually 'indie') albums of the year."

Hype-raking reviews aside, there's this important detail: Why There Are Mountains is a real album, a 'grower' that dishes out simple pleasures with every spin.