Album by Cheekface
Cheekface has released three albums in three years.
When I finished It’s Sorted, I thought I might be a Cheekface fan. After Middle Spoon, and now Podium, they may actually be my favorite band making music today.
Cheekface has this ridiculous ability to pair sharp wit, satire and subversive lyrics with music that is incredibly fun to listen to. The songs can be political, strange, uncomfortable, absurd or genuinely bleak, but there is almost always a great beat underneath them. Catchy choruses. Great harmonies. Grooves that make you want to move even when you’re still trying to figure out exactly what they’re singing about.
Honestly, I have yet to hear a bad Cheekface song.
Podium continues that streak.
The album is funkier than the Cheekface I heard on It’s Sorted and Middle Spoon. There are beats that almost feel like hip-hop. There’s disco, funk, punk, indie rock, pop, acoustic music and some really interesting experimental touches.
There are also a number of references to food, supermarkets and things people buy throughout the album. Erewhon, the famously expensive Los Angeles grocery store, gets mentioned more than once. I don’t know if there’s some bigger connection tying all of that together, or if it’s just a fun thing to notice as you bounce along to the music.
The album also has a lot of political material, but I don’t think Cheekface is simply trying to make political songs. A lot of the time, they’re more interested in how people behave around politics — how we perform our beliefs, argue online, turn politics into an identity, or convince ourselves we’re changing the world while sitting behind a screen.
And they make all of this ridiculously fun.
“Hostile Street” is a great introduction to the album. It has a funky beat and almost feels like a rap song, except for the deliberately awkward spoken-word cadence. The verses are full of wordplay before the chorus kicks in and becomes completely infectious. It’s the kind of song that can get people moving even when they have no idea what is going on.
“There Is God” does something similar. Another great beat that feels like it could have been lifted from a rap record, with spoken-word vocals telling a strange little story. There are record scratches and sounds that give the backing track a little 70s movie soundtrack feel. The beat is legitimately fantastic. You could put it underneath a De La Soul song and nobody would question it.
“Peanut Butter Prawns” is almost doo-wop. The backing vocals are fantastic, and there are horns and saxophone floating around the arrangement. The song is built around strange combinations and unlikely pairings, treating them all as if they make perfect sense.
The horns really come alive on “The Weather,” and the choruses are incredibly satisfying. The song slows things down a little while still maintaining a great groove, with some of my favorite drumming on the album.
“MFT” has another great beat, although it’s more comfortable and steady. The vocals are earnest here. The song observes the increasingly strange role chatbots can play when someone feels like they have nowhere else to unload their mental-health struggles.
“Rent Is Down” is probably the most heartfelt song on the album, and it contains the best vocal performance I’ve heard from Greg Katz since I started listening to Cheekface. Musically, it’s melodic, beautiful and restrained, with a relaxed groove underneath it.
Then “Black Site” comes crashing in. This is a big rocker. Probably the loudest song on the album so far, moving through alternative rock with little pieces of 60s and 80s rock and roll mixed in. It’s a fun ride paired with a darkly comic take on the end of the American experiment.
“No Fly Zone” might be the best straight-up rock-pop song on the album. The hooks are amazing, and it has another fantastic vocal performance, a great chorus and an ending that gets so big and loud that I honestly don’t know how a three-piece band makes this much noise. It sounds enormous for a song about loneliness.
“I Don’t Work Here” This one is almost a blur. There’s disco, rap, punk, indie rock and all kinds of 70s sounds moving together, and the whole thing has so much momentum that you just fly along with it.
“EBT” is probably the most restrained song on the album. It’s acoustic and dreamy, with a lot of wordplay and contradiction throughout. It feels like a song about the economics of being in a band — trying to make music while also trying to make a living.
“Discrete” might be the most experimental song on the album. Not experimental in some avant-garde sense, but it takes the Cheekface sound somewhere stranger. There’s a dark beat, distorted vocals and a saxophone that floats around in this wild, almost haphazard way as the song takes a swipe at performative online politics versus what is actually happening in the world outside.
“U Can’t Do It” brings the music back up again. It’s less than two minutes, but it packs a ridiculously catchy groove and hook into that short amount of time. It’s a take on the online commodification of politics — political identity becoming content, branding and a way to make money.
“I Decline” takes things back into more familiar Cheekface territory. It has that bouncy, conversational quality, with funky beats underneath the verses and harmonies on the choruses. It blends indie rock with hip-hop-influenced rhythms, capturing the exhaustion of declining to participate in the endless cycle while knowing the arguments and memes are going to keep going anyway.
Podium is funny, strange, catchy, musically adventurous and ridiculously fun. It might be my favorite Cheekface album yet, and at this point I’m starting to think I just want them to keep making these kinds of records in perpetuity.
So, what do you say? Same time next year?
Verdict: Great
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