Cheer-Accident – New Ear 25 – We do always have to prefix these Cheer Accident reviews for these particular albums for those who don’t know the band, for you see, as glorious as this is, as proper as this is, this is not a proper Cheer Accident album, I mean it is, everything they do is proper. Let me try and explain, skip this bit if you know the band already, jump to the second paragraph, or better still, jump straight to the music, if you know already you don’t need our words. You see in the four decades that they (and us, almost) have been around, they’ve released these brilliant experimental sound art flavoured improv albums and then they’ve released their ‘proper’ albums, their full-on full-bodied far more prog than most progressive rock albums and (unless improvised sound experiments and the art of improvised abstract reaction to each other is your thing and full of crafted Progressive Rock isn’t) you really need to start with 2022’s Here Comes The Sunset or our 2020 album of the year, Chicago XX (which was the Chicago band’s 20th proper album) and then go ask why this band aren’t all over the glossy prog magazines and and battling the godawful Neo infestation that some try to pass off as Prog Rock these days? Put simply, Cheer Accident have been the best prog rock band out there for years now, prog in the saense of yes or Genesis or Van Der Graaf Generator, proper prog. This is not one of their ‘proper’ albums.   

I mean this is brilliant, listen to the colour of Adjacent and that glorious 7.33 minutes of insects running over strings or while cats play pianos and spider dance around the architecture and the marvellous mechanical mouse organ (is that lost on Americans? Do they know about Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organs in Chicago?) Or those twelve and a half minutes of improvised Sargent Pepper’s logical next step that is To Somehow Hopefully Get There. oh yes, this is hard-boiled hardcore improv art. “Four decades hitting the ground improvising when the clock turns Ear; year #4 of celebrating the New Ear on Bandcamp. As always, recorded in the CheerAx Basement, in the heart of The Park Known As Humboldt, in Chicago”. It has been a tradition you see, a tradition for Cheer Accident and friends to gather in their basement and create their way into a New Year, looks like around a dozen of them were there in the basement as 2024 became 2025 and it has now become a thing to edit the goings on down to a fully formed album that usually sees the light of day around a month into the new year as this one has done today of the first day of February.

And how can there be cookies if there’s nothing in them? These albums are always brilliant, just a gang of accomplished musicians with no need to prove anything to anyone, just a bunch of friends making art, making brilliant sounds together, just doing it all night down in their basement. Some of it difficultly hard-boiled, some of it gracefully melodic and light of touch, some of it just beautifully there, a moment captured forever like that flowing glowing section three and a bit minutes into Silver Summer and well apparently, do it, do it, go, go…  jazz, lazz, more jazz, make it happen, oh yeah.

Wouldn’t you just love to hear the bits that never made the final cut? Okay, maybe not, thanks heavens for the editor (maybe?) and if this review isn’t written today it will never happen (if indeed it is a review) and back to that delicious minute and a half of static at the start of the whole thing again and well, what more does actually need to be said, that bit is parping – make a honking sound – “the organ parped into the Bridal March”. This bit glows, that bit sounds a bit like an old Mike Westbrook album I bought in a charity shop without knowing a thing about him when I was an art student (or maybe it doesn’t?), and that bit sounds like going to the corner shop in January when you really want to go to the moon or maybe just to bed? And I could hit random keys here and see what might come out? And if you are still reading it is time to stop now and let the music itself do the talking. oh this bit is good, oh we’re back around to the middle bit of Adjacent and that glorious 7.33 minutes of insects running over strings and my work is done here. Brilliant stuff, these New Ear albums always are… (sw)

Bandcamp / Facebook /Previously on these pages / website

previously

ORGAN THING: Cheer Accident’s new album – oh look, if you already know then you know, if you don’t then you really should. Here Comes The Sunset cranks up the prog and a whole lot more (again)

ORGAN THING: The outrageously rewarding new Cheer Accident album, the Chicago band’s twentieth, surely they have no right to still be this good…

ORGAN THING: The mighty Cheer Accident covering the Theme From Shaft, how cool is that…

ORGAN THING: Cheer Accident’s new album Fades is a beautifully refreshing thing, a glorious Organ Thing of The Day…