Six years after their last album, ‘No Ifs, Ands or Dogs’, Cheer-Accident are back with their eighteenth studio album. During the last thirty years they have had something of a fluid line-up (including members who don’t actually perform with the band, or do normally but don’t play on this album), and there are fourteen musicians credited here, but at the heart of it there has always been Jeff Libersher (guitar, trumpet, vocals, keyboards) and Thymme Jones (drums, vocals, piano, trumpet, keyboards, acoustic and electric guitars, moog, noise). I think the most polite way to describe their music to a newcomer would be “eclectic”, with some RIO thrown in for good measure. They’ve conjure up a unique collage of intricate prog, lush pop and experimental noise, drawing on the disparate influences of Pere Ubu, King Crimson, Can, Art Bears, Wire, early Genesis and Yes, and the more Baroque leaps of the Beatles and the Beach Boys without ever settling on a sound that could be definitively traced to any of them in isolation.
Take opening number “Language Is” for example, which starts off a piano and vocal number, but just when the listener feels that they know what is going on and settles back in their comfy chair, all sorts of weird stuff starts happening so that by the end of the eleven-minute-long epic they end up scratching their head asking “what on earth just happened?”. This is progressive rock that really is, refusing to conform to any ideal of what the sound should be like, but organically playing and experimenting with the music until the band themselves understand what they have before them. However, unlike many others operating within this particular musical sphere there is often a great deal of melody, and the music makes logical sense. But don’t relax too much, as there are also plenty of times when it doesn’t, but does, if you get what I mean.
Yet again Cuneiform are working with a band (this is their third album on the label) that the mainstream music industry wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, and all of us who hear this are much the richer for the experience.
