WHAT SEQUEL?

What Sequel? Is supposed to be the follow up to Cheer-Accident's 1994 album, The Why Album; it is supposed to be a Cheer-Accident "pop" album. The question is, are Cheer- Accident even capable of pop music?

Admittedly, I approached this album with a small amount of trepidation. Cheer-Accident is such a master of weird noises that I was truly hoping this album would be full of songs in the vein of "The Day After I Never Met You" off the previous album, Introducing Lemon. That song married catchiness, odd lyrics, and unique instrumentation in a way that was, in my ears, perfect.

This album does not quite follow that path. The song are ever-so-slightly more normal than anything on Introducing Lemon. And while there are instrumental breaks, they work around the vocals, instead of being given a lot of space like on the previous album. In short, my third foray into Cheer-Accidents discography was yet another album that sounded like nothing I had heard by them before.

The music here does not grab you as quick as pop music you will hear on the radio; very few of the tracks on the album stood out on the first listen, and there were not anthemic choruses to blast, no beats to dance to. Yet, song-structure wise, this album is not too far from pop- music, with choruses and verses, and a lot of singing.

The lucky news here is that the singing here is actually quite nice, in it's own unique way. His voice is quite unique, and although his normal register singing could be described as an acquired taste, when he hits the higher register, the amount of emotion conveyed is quite impressive.

After a few listens, some real gems begin to make themselves apparent. Keep In Touch, the opener, is a song about people from the past taking up space in the singers mind; it is almost awkward yet at the same time, the song from this album that gets stuck in my mind the most often. And it immediately contains proof that Cheer-Accident are still the same, odd band we've come to know and love, with "Boing boing boing boing" being sung in the background at various points.

You Know, You Know is a touching ballad song where the vocals really shine, backed by the horn section in a quite effective way. Nefarious Designs, Inc. has catchy, ringing guitars. Crazy features the band repeating the word "Crazy" for over a minute straight, yet it is surprisingly effective in the context of the song and the song itself is one of the catchier moments on the album.

The album does feature a lot of guitar, but it does not sound like typical - anything, really. This is just Cheer-Accident, making the music they want to make, for which we all are thankful.

The cover of the album is a little bit puzzling at first, but once you look at the liner notes, you see that they have taken a photograph (the same one used for the cover of The Why Album) and applied various effects to it. On the cover, the result of these effects is that the photograph is taken up almost completely by negative space. Perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing, but definitely interesting.

In the end, this album does not reach the heights of Introducing Lemon or Fear Draws Misfortune, but for anyone who already likes the band, it is worth picking up, and you can't really go wrong owning this album - although I would still recommend "Fear Draws Misfortune" as the starting point if you are looking to get into this Chicago-based band.