A slipshod assortment of my favorite music of the year.

Cheer-Accident, “Blue Cheadle”

It’s a minor miracle that I managed to 1) live in Chicago and 2) be a progressive rock fan without ever discovering Cheer-Accident, a progressive rock band from Chicago. They’ve been around nearly 30 years but I never heard of them until my band opened for them at the Hexagon in February. It was probably the most appropriate bill we’ve ever been on: four playfully proggish bands with decent senses of humor, culminating in these bedraggled prog heroes from Chicago playing their hearts out well after midnight on the Hex’s tiny stage.*

“Blue Cheadle” is the best example of the more accessible but no less dangerous direction the band’s taken with their new album, Fear Draws Misfortune. The song forms are shorter and poppier, with indie elements like a fat, wet snare sound, horns and strings, and female harmonies. Lord knows what the title means, or what the lyrics are, but it’s one hell of a song, as much for its grooves and melodies as its wickedly impossible meters.

Also here’s a video of the band performing the song at the Hideout, in Chicago.

*Two highlights of that show, by the way, were when some jerk in the audience shouted “Chicago sucks!” during a quiet moment in a song, and Thymme Jones responded, while still playing, “The city, or the band?” and when bassist Alex Perkolup told Run At The Dog that we sounded like the B-52s, only “less gay.”