Cheatahs Wikipedia

Nathan Hewitt’s shoegaze-inspired noise pop band from London that began as a solo home recording project. Cheatahs sound like they’re well on the way to loosening the earlier associations sewn on by the press and forming their own identity, as an internationally renowned band. Recorded over a period of a year, Mythologies takes its name from Roland Barthes’ 1957 collection of essays on semiotics and myth, which influenced the record along with such varied themes and inspirations as Freudian ‘screen memory’, the fluidity of recollection, meta-modernism, hospitalisation on tour, syndicalism, Dennis Potter, Early music and neo-mysticism (to name a few). On ‘I’ and ‘IV’, blocks of droning feedback paint a sonic realisation of Mark Rothko’s bleak Seagram murals, while on ‘Northern Exposure’, ‘Mission Creep’ and the elliptical ‘Leave To Remain’, vocalist Nathan Hewitt switches from anguish to serene rapture to gnarly punk intensity with apparent ease.

Mythologies

With their sophomore LP, the band demonstrates even further their devotion to experimentation, leaving behind the debut’s hazy, nostalgic world for Mythologies’ ambitious Technicolor universe, in which motorik rhythms, garage and ambient punk flow seamlessly into one another. 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.

There’s a lo-fi, emo-tinged sense of crossing the hope/despair frontier, blended with a disaffected early grunge aesthetic and completed with a shot of processed no wave angles where guitars generate delicate melodic gestures or buzz wildly like Sonic Youth during a major freak-out interlude. Scrobbling is when Last.fm tracks the music you listen to and automatically adds it to your music profile.

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. With songs written by Nathan and James beginning to pile up, the band decided to make a follow up EP immediately; again produced by Dean, the quartet recorded the bulk of the music in their Hackney studio over a weekend in June. Shortly after, the band supported Milk Music in east London, a gig at which, as luck would have it, Mark and Ben from Wichita were in attendance. The duo were impressed by the set and asked the band if they had any recorded music they could listen to. After hearing “Coared” and the unreleased songs, Wichita signed Cheatahs and released the “SANS” EP, as well as a compilation of the “SANS” and “Coared” EPs outside the UK.

Cheatahs

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. 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. As with their previous work, all tracks were recorded and mixed by Dean and produced by the band. With their critically acclaimed self-titled debut album and incendiary live Cheatahs shows, Cheatahs proved themselves to be one of the most exciting leftfield guitar bands to come out of the UK in recent years.

Fast-forward six years––each having played in various bands in between––and the friends finally began to work seriously together when Nathan asked James to collaborate on a batch of songs he’d been working on. The musical understanding between the two was instantaneous and they went about recruiting two friends to complete the lineup––bassist and producer Dean Reid, who had moved to London from San Diego, California, a few years before, and drummer Marc Raue, originally from Dresden, Germany. 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.

Witchita Recordings

The album is first and foremost an exploration of the possibilities of modern guitar music. A blend of ecstatic noise, ambient drone and visceral, ear-splitting alt-rock, combined with lyrics that touch on the complexities of relationships, nature, the city, memory, dislocation and self-identity, the self-titled record displays a giant creative leap from the lo-fi fuzz of the band’s first two EPs. Cheatahs frontman Nathan Hewitt and guitarist James Wignall met eight years ago while working in a Camden pub, and instantly bonded over their shared passion for music and Seinfeld. Nathan had just moved to London from his hometown of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, while James, originally from Leicester, had moved to the capital after studying in Leeds.