By: Rich Buley
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Released on October 30, 2015 via Wichita
Since signing to Wichita in 2012, London based indie rock four piece Cheatahs have been fairly prolific in their output. Two albums, four EP’s, a remix EP and three singles is some going by anyone’s standards. During this time the band have generally exhibited a fondness for the ramshackle, reverb-heavy guitars of Dinosaur Jr. and early Swervedriver, with Nathan Hewitt’s languid, lonesome vocal delivery continuing the old-school ‘slacker rock’ vibe.
However, with this year’s Murasaki EP, the band quite unexpectedly showed an entirely different side to them, with playful, experimental arrangements and a whole heap more electronica.
Mythologies, the second album, very much continues this metamorphosis. It is a veritable smorgasboard of styles, sounds and ideas, and sees Cheatahs confidently move away from what previously appeared to be a game plan based upon furious guitars and a faraway look in their eyes. The fact that the album is made up of 13 tracks demonstrate the band’s abundance of creativity, and their willingness to let us hear as much as possible of their experimental endeavours. Cheatahs’ sudden evolution brings to mind the move made by The Boo Radleys with the release of the classic Giant Steps in 1993, following an early career making as much noise as possible.
Opener ‘Red Lakes (Sternstunden)’ could quite easily fit onto that album actually, with Hewitt’s heavily processed vocal during the verse and the swirling sequencing. On the soft, understated motorik pop of ‘In Flux’ and the overt vocal melodies and twisted rhythms of ‘Seven Sisters’, Cheatahs’ studio experimentation appears to know few bounds, the dishevelled, outright punk of the first half of ‘Colorado’ (the second half of course being ambient introspection) and ‘Supra’ two other cases in point. It sounds like it is very good fun being in this band, with a semi-decent recording budget and an opportunity to throw the kitchen sink at it certainly not missed out upon.
The previously released ‘Murasaki’ and ‘Signs To Lorelei’ prove the undoubted highlights of the album, but in very different ways, with the former’s far eastern flavoured synths and resonating guitars, and the latter’s wonky, other-wordly synth motif and grungy underbelly.
Elsewhere, we find some of what we came to expect from Cheatahs version 1, with the pounding rhythm section of ‘Freak Waves’, and the more straight-form college rock of ‘Channel View’ and the catchy as a cold ‘Hey, Sen’.
Mythologies is the sound of Cheatahs not just breaking out from the sonic limitations of their previous incarnation, but almost literally wiping the canvas clean of it, and re-imagining themselves. Yes, the fact that it is still the same four players in the band means that overall the music retains the same mood and energy as their earlier material- it still sounds very much like Cheatahs- but with them having opened up a new palette of seemingly endless artistic makeovers. The result is a spasmodic, perplexing, thoroughly entertaining record.
