4 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft

Produced by: ?

I’m surely guilty of defining what I’ve heard by what I’ve heard before. Which… makes sense, as that’s our frame of reference, but it can be a bit funny considering we’re likely not listening to everything in chronological order of production. So my first exposure to Cheer-Accident was either late 90s or early 00s as part of Skin Graft’s catalogue, and that’s been my main line to them along the way. Without glancing at their history, that meant that I was comparing to other things on Skin Graft – mainly low-end heavy improv / noise acts like Brise-Glase or You Fantastic! – and nodding with assuredness about how all of this great Chicago oddball music must’ve happened at the same time, swapping band members back and forth and influencing one another. Not wholly inaccurate, until you do look at C-A’s history and catalogue and note that it stretches back to the early 80s. Yeah, all those SG players were kicking around in the scene in various formats, but if we’re looking specifically at bands: C-A was one of the first doing that no-wave weirdass rock thing that Skin Graft would come to typify (let’s focus on that label, lest I’m here trying to backpeddle and rewrite no-wave history), and the rest were in their wake, with Cheer’s members being mainstays in or forming or guesting in or etcetera in other bands – they were the influence.

Gobbling up Cheer’s catalogue is quite a journey; one I certainly haven’t completed. But poking at it here and there, it’s amazing how consistent it is. Yeah, the early stuff is much more comparatively linear and proggy, and if you set select songs against one another, they can be stylistically drastically different, to the extent that a more casual listener like m’self could not tell you that they’re both the same band. A more piecemeal approach is warranted, sampling songs in batches from across the eras, and that’s when that consistency emerges: C-A have always been pretty weird, and can always swing the meter on weirdness back to shocking moments of musicality and tunefulness. They’re never far away from a riff, but also never far away from something just utterly bizarre.

Fringements One is kind of exactly that piecemeal sampling, boiled down to a short-attention-span approach of cutting room floor snippets, with many of its tracks less than a minute, and initially released in digital pieces – months apart, three or so tracks at a time. This release approach was firstly tantalizing, and also frustrating: it was good to have time to digest what we were hearing, often equally dense and nonsensical, but then I don’t know how much I was revisiting the songs after an initial listen, instead waiting to hear what things would sound like when paired with the followup tracks. And on a full album release of those songs, it all feels pretty daunting, and initially, very jarring, as we get hard cuts between some songs as the demo / idea just ends.

Fringements One takes material from across the years, from the sources mentioned, but also some nearly finished (or finished) tracks – all stuff that just didn’t make it onto albums, or get fully realized into a song. While some of the stuff may feel like toss-offs (answering machine messages; 30-second ditties), it ends up gaining a lot of strength the more time you give it, appreciating that there’s sequencing happening here to kind of daisy chain you from moment to moment, allowing focus on some amazing bursts of composition or full-on songs, and using the varying styles of the rest (and the toss-offs) to keep you well tuned in. Even after a few tracks of this stop-and-start feeling, you may realize: things are flowing. You’re in sync. And then you give the disc another go, and there’s no stop-and-start at all.

The intense, song-by-song liner notes show off the depth of this stuff further, giving credence to how much thought and emotion there has been behind the music this whole while, but told in a way that feels accessible. Is Fringements One good for a new C-A listener? I mean, it gives you the whole range, of piano prog to no-wave skronk and weird improv manipulations and just some quality riffage, but, admittedly, it takes a beat to congeal into an album. That said, if that new listener is willing to give it those beats – and I don’t think it’s hard to – this can be a gateway of curiosity to check out even more.

For a seasoned C-A listener? Man, this is almost like a victory lap, except the group has taken plenty of those on album already. So perhaps it’s a gift: seeing behind the curtain, and understanding that the consistency we’ve heard over decades requires cutting off fat which any other group would love to pass off as a top single. There are some damned talented people in this world.