With Ride and Lush reunions currently surfing the sonic skywaves into the glistening new shoegaze dawn on boards made of cumulonimbus (or something), it was about time the nu-shoe wave started mingling their early-90s cathedrals (well, more often Presbyterian leisure centres) of sound with the psych magic of the cobberdelia movement emerging from Perth acts like Tame Impala and Pond.
The band to do it are London’s Cheatahs – coming variably from Dresden, San Diego, Alberta and Leicester – whose 2014 self-titled debut album emulated My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr and Brit grunge, but whose second explores Wookie Holes all their own.
Their guitars and (sometimes backwards) vocals are set to Maximum Phase, doing everything possible to sound like the first rock gig in a Crossrail tunnel-digger. Cheatahs create melodic miasmas of space marimba, psych pop and crystalline drones, while lyrically teleporting around the globe.
Signs To Lorelei pays tribute to an island on the Rhine, Murasaki is inspired by Japanese novelist Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale Of Genji, Colorado sounds like a My Bloody Valentine gig in Hades and Seven Sisters makes an ‘up-and-coming’ grot-hole in North London sound like the sort of place Spacemen 3 might buy their ketamine. Such exotic filth…
