You walk into your favorite local cafe and order an iced espresso, the one bit of frivolity you allow yourself amidst work, studies, and the unceasing rush of life. You’ll resort to inferior coffee when you are chugging it at 3:00 AM, trying to make up for the time you spent scrolling, reloading, searching, browsing, scrolling, reloading until the day had passed. You settle into the far corner and log into your laptop — deadlines are amassing and emails are piling, but that’s too much to consider this early in the morning. Instead, you open Reddit and scroll the front page of the internet.
Through posts, users, threads, and subreddits, most of the posters seem to be saying the same thing — things are awful, but we are all in this together. You feel similarly doomed, but find some solace in knowing that you can at least have company on your way. As the caffeine starts to take effect, you begin to tune in to the conversation of the table next to you. They speak a blend of fluent academia and internet slang, discussing Marxism and neural networks alongside memes and the all-important question of whether a hot dog is a sandwich. This is your company. This is your language of irony and deflection, trying to make the best out of the situation you are all stuck in together.
Cheekface is the musical embodiment of today’s youth culture — terminally online, often depressed, and all too self aware, but also with an incorruptible sense of fun and personality in spite of everything. Not necessarily optimistic, but at least not bitter.
Their latest album, Too Much To Ask, opens with “When Life Hands You Problems,” which essentially presents the thesis of the album, “I don’t know anything, you don’t know anything, we don’t know anything together.” It also sets up the lives of the people concerned (“I am always working, but I don’t have any money”), as well as the humor, which frequently comes in the form of absurdity, hyper-literal interpretations, and comically obvious statements.
“We Need a Bigger Dumpster” seems to take inspiration from the “this is fine meme,” which has been used in progressively worse situations to joke about our collective will to try to accept disastrous changes into our lives and convince ourselves that they aren’t really that bad, all while knowing that everything is going up in a blazing inferno barely contained by a putrid dumpster that is rapidly filling up with the ash in which we will suffocate if we haven’t already burned first. But there is also something quite funny about that image, so maybe we are fine after all if we have the ability to find humor somewhere.
Throughout the album, Cheekface maintains a light, cheerful sound, representing the optimism that is overtly ironic, but is accompanied by a very genuine sense of fun that permeates each track. Personality is one of its greatest strengths — it has numerous influences, but each one is incorporated effectively to create something unique and instantly recognizable.
One of the best examples of Cheekface’s use of influence are the LCD Soundsystem nods on “Featured Singer,” borrowing the band’s signature bells, the opening guitar line on “All I Want” (which is itself a nod to “Heroes” by David Bowie), and James Murphy’s semi-sarcastic spoken vocals. Other bands who contribute fragments of Cheekface’s sound include Parquet Courts, Pavement, and Minutemen, while their lyrics are somewhat reminiscent of David Dondero (especially on The Filter Bubble Blues) or a more humorous Car Seat Headrest.
The fantastically humorous and absurd lyrics continue on “You Always Want to Bomb The Middle East,” “Friends,” and “Next to Me,” the last of which is one of the catchiest songs I have heard yet this year. Too Much to Ask concludes with “Vegan Water,” a clash of self deprecation and overconfidence that runs like a logically disjointed stream of consciousness, all over an infectious bassline.
So pack up your computer, order another coffee for the walk (what’s the harm in a bit of frivolity anyway?), and take leave of your new friends. Nothing is fine, but it’s the best we can do. At least we have company.