Cheem - Power Move
A disclaimer. I paid Skye Holden $33.11 to scratch the commentary from the Sean Burke/Dominic Roussel goalie fight on a song called "Hey There Sports Fans" by my old band called Goalie Fight. The album is called On Ice! and I still have too many copies of it in my apartment.
I first learned about Cheem in college. I was stuck inside studying for exams, fantasizing about all the shows I could be going to instead, so I decided to soundtrack my study sessions with all the bands that were playing Pittsburgh that week. I figured if I wasn't able to see them, I could at least hear them. It just so happened that Cheem was playing a show with Harrison Lipton, Short Fictions, and Brightside at the Mr. Roboto Project. They suddenly became my favorite emo band; heck, one of my favorite bands, period. Then, just as suddenly, they decided that they weren't an emo band anymore.
If Guilty Pleasure was their coming out album, Power Move is Cheem's attempt to push their way to the next tier. Now that they've put themselves out there as an honest-to-god rap rock band and YouTube Shorts meme, they're able to move beyond 4th-wave emo entirely. They no longer feel the need to justify themselves in their sonic choices. They chug, they skank, they scratch records and have fun doing it. The jokey video game soundtrack of reference has shifted from Sonic Adventure 2 to Persona 3 Remake.
Cheem embody that greatest, most insidious quality of American pop music: the assimilation of other sounds. Opening track "Pivot" sounds like the result of the pop-rock honing process done on the Fast Fashion EPs. "Gorilla Glue" is an easycore banger with a ringtone bridge. "Nano" is merely the most obvious hint on the record that some of these cats went to music school. Closers "Password" and "TMZ" show off two sides of contemporary RnB. There's rap rock, reggae, neo-soul, nu-metal, straight-up radio pop, and the lingering remnants of emo as well in the mix.
Sam Nazaretian belts and quavers like Brendan Urie, but also pulls back into smooth falsetto. Skye Holden still has the broad New York City swagger and white boy flows, but he also croons on more songs than he has in a long time. I'd missed his singing voice. Prince Porter (of Similar Kind and Umlaut) has solidified his place in the band and stepped up as a songwriter, as evidenced by the increased prominence of his big bad bass on almost every track. Overall, Cheem got funkier and more intense on Power Move, but their sound is still eminently approachable.
A lot of the riffs have the quality of (bear with me here) certain Creed songs, where Skye and Gabe's syncopated guitar parts will sound alien, almost progressive when taken out of context, but the confident and comparatively simple vocal melody pulls them together. I mean, have you ever taken a look at the crazy bass part of "Higher"? it's nuts. Anyway, Cheem take advantage of that, giving guitar breaks and isolated synth intros just enough time to disorient the audience before grounding them with melody and drums. "Freeze Tag" is an excellent example of this, turning a manic clean guitar riff into a white-belt double time verse, which flows into a big Coheed & Cambria chorus and a rapped breakdown like it's the most natural thing in the world.
The only song I don't like on Power Move is "Elastic", which has a bouncy chorus and cool guitar phrasing, but the verses are a comparative letdown. The MC Taya feature and subsequent bass solo kill the momentum of the song. The other two features give more than they take. Fellow genre-blenders pulses. take a fun, squirmy verse on "Quench" and fellow nutmegger & ex-Brockhampton rapper Don McLennon kicks "Spin Cycle" to a euphoric next level.
Sam and Skye have freed themselves to just be pop stars and they sing about pop music things. There are love songs here, breakup songs too, almost none of the doubt and frustration of Making a Planet and Downfall. Most of the songs are clean so they can be played on terrestrial radio. They've even been teasing a deluxe edition of the CD, which is a crazy thing for an independent scene band to be doing. Cheem really has some opportunities to make some power moves off the back of material this strong.