Cheer Accident – You Smile – The Song Is Over (Cuneiform Records) – This is deep Cheer-Accident, this is high-end Cheer-Accident, the sort that makes you stop and ask “what is that!?” This is the serious stuff. Oh I love it! This is defiantly Cheer-Accident and once again, they gone to different corners, into strange boxes just to see what they can do with the things waiting in there, they’ve gone over the garden wall, this once again is something different. Cheer-Accident are and have been for years now, the best properly progressive prog band in the world and as serious as this always is, at the same time they always make us smile, this time they have me punching the air in here, yes indeed! I love this band, this matters, this is why we still so this (stupid) Organ thing we continue do. You Smile – The Song is Over sounds nothing like Cheer-Accident and yet it could be no one else besides the always radiant Cheer-Accident, their finger prints are all over it and those finger prints are as unique as a finger print could possibly be.
What is this now? Album number twenty seven? We’ve been covering them since the first one came out back in the last century (there’s way more than twenty seven albums of course, there’s all the other strange experiments and the New Year albums, the New Ear things, oh, twenty seven is only the start of it)
Now if you just want the conservatively boring big big porcupine trees then this is probably way to progressive for you, but if you really want your prog to be progressively challenging and, without ever taken a backwards glance, laced with all the best things from the days of Gentle Giant, proper Genesis, National Health or Henry Cow then this is it! That bit there sounds like prime Jethro Tull at their most experimental and if you like runs of Glockenspiels, notes that are hung on to for just a little bit longer than they should be hung on to because that’s what art requires, if you like it properly avant and you like it to push you just a little further then this is it. And that bit there, that bit in the Blue Lie, that is serious classical composition…
And then there’s the achingly beautiful bits when the day turns over and the sky stops burning and life is absence moving backwards, all way from the depths to shores, all the way from nowhere, just voices and minimal instrumentation, just a quiet organ and a voice and just so so (s) gorgeous. I don’t why? I don’t know how they manage to do this and yes, I do need to mention Cardiacs before the ocean swallows me, Absence Moving Backwards is something very (very) special, something deeply emotional, right now it might just be the most beautiful piece of music ever, and the minimal seven minute drone and just the right note that is Epilogue straight after it. Perfect.
Sometimes the band from Chicago make prog albums that are almost pop albums, sometimes they make easy listening records, sometimes they make not very easy listening records – hang on, here comes that trumpet – and sometimes they make very experimental albums that almost defy you to stay with them, no two Cheer-Accident albums are ever the same yet they always always sound like no one other than Cheer-Accident, they are always instantly recognisable and this new album? Well, this time, this time they’ve got it all in there, on the first day of properly listening it sounded just right, and two weeks on it sounds as good as the first time, it sounds like a little bit of everything. This might be their best album yet (but then I probably said that last time and the time before that and probably the time before that as well.
Hang on there’s that jarring riff that is another trademark. But I do have to keep going back to Absence Moving Backwards, I have been listening to that one beautiful song on repeat for days
And actually The Blue Lie, as we play it again here, The Blue Lie just might be their finest moment ever, breathtaking, it just might be peak Cheer-Accident, it is as fine as anything from Prog Rock’s finest days back there and then Absence Moving Backwards following it in the way it does, and then Epilogue straight after it. Just absolutely perfect.
And that is really where the album ends but then this is Cheer-Accident so there’s a whole other album to follow on, that mischievous live side of theirs and another bag load of more experimental tracks but you need to explore all that yourself, and of course by the time we get to track twenty and the squeaky wheel or is a clown car horn? And the “what do you think of that?” tease
They do like a challenge, they do like to tease; “we beg for challenges actually”
Cheer-Accident constantly challenge, Cheer-Accident are up there with the very very best Prog bands, they’re up there with Cardiacs, with Henry Cow, with the very best of them. Cheer-Accident are one of the reasons we still do this (stupid) thing we do. This, their twenty-seventh album, is their best one yet… (sw)
Bandcamp / www.cuneiformrecords.com
Previously on these pages…
Oh there’s loads more… we’ve been covering Cheer-Accident since the 80s
THE ORGAN 