It’s been a long time since New York City sounded like Cheena. In a year that’s seen some of the city’s greatest venues and record stores shutting their doors, Cheena’s New York is undoubtedly a figment of the past. On their debut album, Spend the Night With..., the band longs for an instantly recognizable but long-gone locale: home of CBGB’s, leather jackets, cheap rent, the New York fuckin’ Dolls. Like the band’s Instagram-ready pose on the album cover, these aren't just sounds you stumble upon in the wild. You have to summon them specifically. It makes sense, then, that Cheena is a band composed not only of lifelong New Yorkers, but also of long-time New York musicians from the city’s noise and hardcore scenes, notably including Pharmakon’s Margaret Chardiet on lead guitar and Keegan Dakkar of the gothic punk outfit Anasazi.
While the members of Cheena share a history of using their music to provoke and push boundaries, Spend the Night finds them settling into more comfortable territory. The reference points are clear and shameless, channeling the rockabilly swagger of the Gun Club, the coked-out blues rock of *Goats Head Soup-*era Stones, and, of course, plenty of the Dolls. With such a specific set of influences, Cheena emerges both too confident to be deemed just a side project yet too understated to feel like a supergroup. Instead, Cheena is just an old-fashioned rock band.
In accordance with their old school philosophy, *Spend the Night With... *is an old-school kind of album. It’s a fast-paced, ten-song ordeal, over in just thirty minutes. The hit-after-hit structure lends the album a breezy, amiable flow, but one that occasionally threatens to steer them into monochromatic territory. Vocalist Walker Behl, who cut his teeth in the hardcore band Crazy Spirit, has a snarly growl that aims for attitude over melody, a quality that fails to make most of the songs any greater than just the sum of their riffs. Overall, the album has the feel of a solid, well-paced live set. You might not leave humming the songs, but you’ll still have fun.
Aside from “Liberated Animal,” whose gnarly, dissonant riff reminds you that Chardiet is a musician with a history of “effectively convey[ing] the disturbing nature of corporeality,” Spend the Night With... is mostly content to just be a good time. The moments that stick with you then are the ones where the band amps up the melody and energy, like on infectious single “Stupor,” or when they just switch things up entirely, as they do on mid-album country weeper “Electric Snoopy Gang.” Aside from that song’s deeply literal balladeering (“Knick knack paddy whack, my doggy’s gone”), Cheena specializes in late-night party anthems. When you can make out what he’s saying, Behl is usually just flirting with you, looking for something to do, or sayin’ it like he sees it, as in the album’s quintessential line: “I think New York’s okay.”
Between Biehl’s blase lyrics and Logan Montana’s drunken, yawning slide guitar—the unabashed MVP of the album, oozing through the mix like a snake on the subway tracks– there’s an attractive sense of ease to Cheena. Cheena is not trying to blow your mind. In fact, they’re not trying to do much of anything. But that spirit rings true, and it feels less like a pose the longer the album goes on. Cheena knows that the least New York way to live is to be constantly perplexed and amazed by where you live. As Joan Didion wrote, to merely live in New York is to “reduce the miraculous to the mundane.” After all, she writes, “one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.” For the span of ten songs, Cheena spends the night at Xanadu, absolutely trashes the place, and, in the end, decides it’s just okay.
