5 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: ?

The second volume of Cheer-Accidents odds and ends, and I’ll save you my preamble from that review about how amazed I am / continue to be at the history of C-A’s consistent awesomeness and somehow tonally consistent genre-spanning weirdness… Speeding along to the conclusion: Fringements 02 is even better than One. I think One is still a needed warmup, though, to prove those superlatives I’ve used: a group that does jazz and rock and noise and groove and goofball with equal aplomb; Two then sticks to more of a relative script, focusing (again plucked from across the years) on a generally post-rock sound of moody bass and guitar and drums, with an injection of horns creating some pomp and circumstance about 2/3rds of the way in. Also, a quite beautiful cover of The Police’s Every Breath You Take.

But even this doesn’t register as random: Fringements Two is sequenced perfectly, stacking up its shorter experiments against a select few longer, fully formed tracks, and varying between heavier and gentler tunes as well. While Fringements One gave itself away as a comp – and was more easily read as snippets from various eras – Two comes across as an album, designed to be heard this way. A track – if accurately named – recorded in 1983 sounds wholly at home with tracks recorded in the 90s; even the interstitial stuff feels right here; the set isn’t as much of a test as before, where a couple spins were required to see the bigger picture; Two’s picture is notably big – but graspable – as soon as you hit play,

So it’s more of the same from Fingements One, including the extensive, song-by-song liner notes. The same… only better.