The debut album from London’s Cheatahs is an exercise in introspective, eclectic art-rock.
There’s a lo-fi, emo-tinged sense of crossing the hope/despair frontier, blended with a disaffected early grunge aesthetic and completed with a shot of processed no wave angles where guitars generate delicate melodic gestures or buzz wildly like Sonic Youth during a major freak-out interlude.
On ‘I’ and ‘IV’, blocks of droning feedback paint a sonic realisation of Mark Rothko’s bleak Seagram murals, while on ‘Northern Exposure’, ‘Mission Creep’ and the elliptical ‘Leave To Remain’, vocalist Nathan Hewitt switches from anguish to serene rapture to gnarly punk intensity with apparent ease.
8/10
Words: Mat Smith
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