If you equate ambition with novelty and invention, Cheatahs’ self-titled debut sets the bar as low as any record you’ll hear in 2014. Though the multinational, UK-based quartet works within a very narrow stylistic range on Cheatahs, there’s no specific genre that defines it so much as a time frame. You know when you hear it, you heard it perfected sometime between 1990 and 1994 and it really hasn’t gone anywhere since. You’ll get lots of shoegaze, squalling indie rock and good ol’ alt-rock in various ratios, and every single sound on Cheatahs is taken from that span, with two exceptions: there’s a tiny riff throughout “Fall” that’s a verbatim pull from Wheat’s “Breathe” or Caribou's "Skunks" and the coda on “The Swan” could pass for Interpol’s “PDA". Otherwise, if Cheatahs hadn’t ruined the illusion by performing live and everything, you could conceivably posit this record as an Avalanches sample collage that limited itself to a college radio station’s playlist during the bridge to the Clinton era.
Then again, any fan of kung fu movies or hamburgers know that novelty and invention aren’t required to make a genre exercise enjoyable. Yes, the guitars and Nathan Hewitt’s bedheaded vocals sit entirely within a Moore-Mascis-Shields triangulation, and the bass is almost never as loud as it could be. So Cheatahs distinguish themselves with mundane, crucial songwriting choices—play the oldies a little faster than you remember, throw in a melody you haven’t quite heard yet. The fundamentals of shoegaze facilitate the latter, as its predilection for altered tunings makes it easy to come across unusual chords and progressions. Meanwhile, the saturated distortion and slow-release vocals make these modulations much smoother than they’d otherwise be if played clean. And so it’s not the velocity of “Geographic” that makes it so instantly appealing, nor is it the volume, but rather the way it handles the curves.
Otherwise, Cheatahs derives its pleasures from recall that’s instantaneous, but not specific. There’s a trebly, ascending arpeggio on “Mission Creep” and you can’t quite place the exact Ride song you heard it on, so hey, it’s like a new “old Ride” song! Ditto for the gelatinous chords on “Leave to Remain” that weren’t on Isn’t Anything or Loveless, maybe it was one of the EPs you missed out on. You know Swervedriver were supposed to strap shoegaze ‘cross some engines, but if you never actually heard their music, then you can rest comfortably thinking “Get Tight” is probably what they sounded like.
Because we should be real here: if any of those names are unfamiliar to you, there’s a good chance you weren’t checking for Cheatahs in the first place. Along with parallel revivalists Jagwar Ma, Eagulls and Temples, they’ve proven that conjuring a certain bygone, guitarcentric era of UK rock can be enough to make a debut “highly anticipated.” And by offering these small tweaks, they can still offer a real pleasure and a new way to experience this incredibly familiar music, sort of like your long-time partner deciding to use a slightly different kind of body soap.
Yet, knowing something that small could make a big difference, it’s disappointing to realize that Cheatahs barely try to make any sort of meaningful alteration to what came before. Most of their kind don’t either, but the best use shoegaze as a bridge or an off ramp. For example, Yuck’s debut continues to gain stature for having successfully connected Dinosaur Jr. with Teenage Fanclub and Elliott Smith; that is not an easy task. On Ghost Blonde, No Joy simply played louder than everyone else, and by last year’s Wait to Pleasure, it merged Lush with Siouxsie, Cocteaus and the Cure. There are many passages on Cheatahs resembling those of DIIV’s Oshin, which drove shoegaze backwards into post-punk and ambient.
Cheatahs allow you to namecheck the Drop Nineteens for the first time in at least a decade, but that’s about it. They’re hardly alone, as this style of music is about as puritanical as it gets—you don’t hear any bands cutting this sound with hip-hop or folk, nor has there ever been any explicitly political shoegaze band to my knowledge. It’s an ego-decimating genre that never really had much space for personality. Maybe Cheatahs are just confident that an enjoyable genre piece is more than enough or maybe you just want to get the sounds of Loveless or Nowhere or Souvlaki without having to acknowledge the baggage. And so, Cheatahs might not be a very ambitious record, but it is kinda ballsy.
