ORGAN THING OF THE DAY: A rather exciting thing today, a fresh slice of Chicago’s Cheer Accident, a first slice of their forthcoming new album Fades. Surely one of the finest bands on the planet, one of the few really truly progressive bands, progressive in all senses, a band who challenge themselves as much as they challenge and reward their listeners. The new album, Fades is on the way via our favourite of all labels, Skin Graft records.  The album comes out in May, here’s the front cover art (artwork is always important), there’s a track from the album down there underneath the art, and what a piece of music  it is, prog as flip once more, check out those forward looking flavours, this bodes well, you don’t need our words, fire up the music…

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CHEER-ACCIDENT “Fades” will be released on May 25th, 2018,  you can hear the track “Last But Not Lost” (featuring Carla Kihlstedt of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Rabbit Rabbit Radio on lead vocals) in an exclusive stream here at The ORGAN and via the Skin Graft Bandcamp page right now! Orders are being taken at the SKiN GRAFT Paypal Shop – and we are offering physical and digital bundles over at the SKiN GRAFT Bandcamp Page.

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Weasel Walter: ‘I think they make Ruins sound like indie-pop

Ted Casterline wrote an epic Cheer Accident article that we published in Organ issue 76 back at the start of the century, we’ll post the whole thing up here in the next few days. for now here ‘s a taste

“Cheer Accident are the only band I’ve ever seen that made a big enough impression on me that I had to see them again, and immediately. I wanted to make shure that the set I had seen, which was nothing short of mind-blowing, wasn’t just a fluke. It wasn’t, and the second show, although very different from the one I’d seen in Philly, was every bit as entertaining.

Drummer Thymme Jones formed Cheer Accident in 1981, during his senior year of high school. Over the years, members came and went (mostly bass players, it seems), but as of the late nineties the band had settled into a pretty stable cast: Thymme Jones, Jeff Libersher, Dylan Posa and Phil Bonnet. Tragically, in ’99, guitarist Phil Bonnet was found dead in his car, the victim of a brain aneurysm. Aside from being a pivotal member of Cheer Accident, Phil was also a beloved and respected recording engineer in the Chicago scene. He worked with countless bands in the Chicago underground, and was known for his patience with younger bands and willingness to work “off-the-clock” in order to finish a project. After his passing, the rest of the band went into a year long “mourning” period, but happily they have returned with a new member, Jamie Fillmore, and a new album, ‘Salad Days’.

Bobby Conn: ‘I saw Cheer Accident one time and they had figured out how to sound like a CD was skipping. They’d be plowing through one of their already complex songs when suddenly they’d interrupt the tune with this skipping effect. It was pulled off with such amazing control. The degree of absorbed structure in their music is just mind blowing, but I also think that their demeanour on stage totally belies the “prog” nature of it all”.

Thymme Jones: ‘When Cheer Accident first started playing out (July of ’87), there would always be a handful of people who were really excited by what they heard, but we really didn’t begin to build any momentum in terms of general awareness and acceptance until the mid ’90s. In the 80s, Chicago’s underground…”

More Cheer Accident over the next few days….