You don’t need an excuse to appreciate Cheekface, but a little extra appreciation feels timely. Not only does America’s Local Band have a new album – Podium – coming out in just a few months’ time (that said, when don’t they?), but their good name has been dragged through the mud over the past month.
Sure, with growing popularity comes virality comes disapproval, but how did Cheekface, of all bands, suddenly obtain so many haters? The band’s rejection of AT&T using their music for a commercial due to their links with ICE should clue you in. Piss off one group of parasites and the spread is on.
But the swarms of creeps that ruin any possible online space be damned. It’s time for a mini guide on Cheekface, in which I honour the five songs of their canon that either best represent them, or simply are their best.
#5 – Military Gum (from Middle Spoon)
Essential, but not quintessential, Military Gum is the harshest left turn in Cheekface’s discography. A bit of rap-rock akin to Denzel Curry covering Bulls on Parade, the song contains overdriven, diving riffs that invite a feature from the great McKinley Dixon. The almighty crossover leaves frontman Greg Katz to quietly bark the words “red, white and blue, I want to chew your military gum”. Kinda glad he didn’t rap.
#4 – We Need a Bigger Dumpster (from Too Much to Ask)
We Need a Bigger Dumpster boasts the chorus that best represents the heavy pileup of modern existence. Some say our generation can’t adjust, but what do you want from us when we were crammed into a pandemic, when “I caught a cold, I coughed on all my friends, now everyone is coughing on everybody else” and all anyone can do is act like the dog from the meme where the house is on fire but they’re forced to say “this is fine”?
#3 – Art House (from Middle Spoon)
Greg Katz hardly plays a character, but it’s easy to depict him as a hapless, fish-out-of-water sort who approaches every situation with befuddlement. He writes – and sings – songs about trying, and Art House, following four albums of casually solving the human puzzle as a clueless bug, combines the Greg Katz approach with a far more traditional theme: love. His love is an art house movie, and as he tries to understand this curious, subtitled abnormality, he appears sweeter.
#2 – You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East (from Too Much to Ask)
Even at its darkest, Cheekface’s music will never cease to be funny. Humour comes natural to Katz an co, exhibited best by the lyrical juxtapositions of You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East – not to mention, its pre-solo instrumental bridge that euphorically admits, with beauty, “yes, we can take ourselves seriously, sometimes”. We can confront and admonish those who wish only to do damage. We can also admit to “eating mush all week and it’s time for round food”.
#1 – Popular 2 (from It’s Sorted)
Cheekface is, in essence, the baby of They Might Be Giants and Cake, born at the perfect time to survey life from the nervous lens of wacked-out 2020s culture. No matter how jolly or nerdy we may appear, we’re terrified of the robots that appear primarily as “fear the future” cliches, of the weird possibilities of a Truman Show style situation where we are but the inmates of a zoo, now to those with Ring doorbell cameras. Slap an extremely catchy chorus on that fear and you’ve got Popular 2.
