Cheer-Accident
(Cuneiform)
Thymme Jones' Cheer-Accident, now well into its third decade of existence, works a dense palette of dissonant, anxiety-ridden sounds into complex patterns. In this album, Jones' drums, keyboards and synthesizers are augmented, not just by rock instruments, but a post-modern orchestras of strings, brass, woodwinds and synthesizers. Singers, including Carla Kihlstedt from Tin Hat, Book of Knots, 2 Foot Yard and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, float harmonies and discords over proggy tangles of rhythm and riff.
Jones is a long-time member of Chicago's jazz-into-prog-rock underground, with ties to post-rock outfits like U.S. Maple, Gastr del Sol and the Bobby Conn band. (Todd Rittman of US Maple played in Cheer-Accident for a time, though he is not on this record.) The band's discography includes nearly 20 albums and cassettes, mostly on smaller labels like Complacency, Skin Graft and Pravda. Fear Draws Misfortune is the first album on Cuneiform, though Cheer-Accident fits well with other bands on the label - Bill Brovold's Larval, Upsilon Acrux and others.
Fear Draws Misfortune's best tracks are all or mostly instrumental, the adrenalized, oddly shaped romp of "Mescalito," the caffeinated syncopations of "And Then You Realized You Haven't Left Yet." Here, without the distraction of fluid melodies and counterparts, Jones and his band pound irregular rhythms and unexpected musical intervals into unsettling symmetries. "Blue Cheadle" has the album's most definitive groove, a 4/4 pulse running through feverish musical imagery. There's singing in this cut, but nothing fancy. The main vocal line a post-modern tribal chant of the track's inexplicable title.
The singing tends to detract in most cases, putting a conventional gloss on some very eccentric compositions. Jones himself sings like an understudy in your local theater group's spring musical, his voice wavering with the kind of emotion that has otherwise been carefully checked in these songs. Female vocalists - Carla Kihlstedt, Aleksandra Tomaszewska and Marketa Fajrajzlova - sound more polished, but still seem like an unnecessary element of sentimentality.
Still the vocals reinforce an indefinable whiff of existential dread that hangs over the whole enterprise, hinting that all this complexity is an attempt to escape limitations that are, nonetheless, waiting at the end of every odd-time-signatured measure. "With every calculation/something goes wrong/working out equations/painfully long/what's there to dream of/ when there's no end to come?" warbles Jones in the thesis-summing "According to the Spiral." That balance of science and uncertainty, proficiency and doubt forms the crux of this frustrating but fascinating album.
Standout tracks: "Blue Cheadle" "Mescalito" JENNIFER KELLY
