I spend a lot of time listening to rock music that I hate. There’s lots of excellent hip-hop and pop that’ll you’ll end up consuming via osmosis; as long as you exist and haven’t disavowed all forms of social media then you’ll end up having it recommended to you and listening to it. Rock, being a shambling zombie of a genre, isn’t the same. Visible rock music is basically just pop that you can’t dance to. It’s overproduced wallpaper, constructed to get selected by the shuffle function of any given streaming service and, then, to be inoffensive enough to not be skipped by the inattentive listener.

If you want to find a rock record worth listening to then most of the time you have to trawl through random Bandcamps or the Youtube pages of music promoters who get their channels DMCA’d twice a year. That’s not to say everything chillwave or Kelby McClure (RIP) sends your way is some undiscovered nugget of gold, languishing in obscurity because the music industry has failed to the point where it only rewards lazy, un-original, cliched songwriting. Like I said, I spend a lot of time listening to rock music that I hate. Most of this stuff is awful. It’s every adjective I just listed off, and it barely has an ounce of craftsmanship or technical ability behind it. It’s hundreds, probably thousands, of bands who can’t decide whether they want to be Weezer or American Football, so they decide to be both, very badly. They all blend into each other, to the point where, even if I wanted to name names, I probably couldn’t.

There are DIY bands out there who are doing their own thing, with a distinct style and a unique approach to song writing. There’s Graduating Life, who combine their totally unflinching, deeply personal and bluntly worded lyricism with lurid post-hardcore guitar solos. There’s Prince Daddy and the Hyena, a group who shares an ethos with that one white kid who showed up to highschool parties fucked up on percocets, all the while having the story-telling chops to add some real humanity to that character. There’s Just Friends, who are basically just ripping off the Red Hot Chilli Peppers instead of Weezer, but they’re having enough fun doing it that I don’t really mind.

But the DIY scene that these acts emerge from is insular and masturbatory. It seems like everyone involved is, at most, vaguely critical of the scene itself, while not being openly critical of any one individual until they’re outed as a sexual abuser. (Which happens a lot. It’s a bunch of white dudes getting together to yell about how much their life sucks, so of course it happens a lot.) Anyways, the masturbatory nature of the scene means that it’s rare for an act to emerge that’s a direct response to the scene itself. There are bands who are doing something different, but they’re almost incidental. There are essentially no agitators; bands who’s very ethos is “we are doing something different from the rest of you”. It reflects in the music. If those agitators were present then emo bands today wouldn’t still be making the same type of music as emo bands in 1999.

There are essentially no agitators. That doesn’t mean there are no agitators. There’s Cheem.

I never listened to Cheem’s first album, Making a Planet, outside of snippets. That was still enough to grasp who they were back then. Their incredible technical proficiency was evident; Sam was still a better singer than just about anyone in the DIY scene, the guitar and drum parts were both incredibly complex and well executed. That was just about the only interesting thing they had to offer. They were less of an American Football knock-off and more of a This Towns Needs Guns clone. Excellent musicians who weren’t making anything I hadn’t heard before. If Making a Planet was my introduction to Cheem then I might not have stuck with them. I’m glad it wasn’t.

My introduction to Cheem came through the now DMCA’d Youtube channel KM Music. I clicked on their album Downhill because the album art was cool, looking like something that would be more likely to appear on a vaporwave project than an emo record. There was no Eureka moment. I listened to the whole thing. The technical proficiency was again evident, the guitars parts were layered and incredibly complex. The vocals were uniquely clean for a DIY record. I thought it was pretty good.

Then I listened to it again. And again. And again, and again, and again.

Slowly I started to love stuff about the record I’d barely paid attention to the first time through. The way Sam and Skye would sing two separate vocal melodies at the same time, creating a stream of consciousness effect during breakdowns. The refusal to ever use the same drumline twice. The weird bubbly samples and guitar effects, present throughout the record, but culminating in a bizarre 311-ish breakdown-solo-thing on Wildberry. The way the vocals would essentially act as just another instrument, blurring with the rest of the song, before finally being brought out right to the foreground for the one lyric that Skye really wanted you to hear.

Downhill was a record about rushing to change, forcing yourself to heal. It was an emo record that desperately wanted to be anything but. The tags at the bottom of it’s Bandcamp page were more aspiration than truth; they included genres like “vaporpunk” and “funk-pop”.

“I don’t love what I’ve created anymore”

That line, a refrain from the song Jacuzzi, could just about sum up the ethos of Downhill better than any other line on the record. Downhill was a rejection of what Cheem created on Making a Planet, it was a promise the band made to themselves to make something new, something better, next time.

But I think a better representation of the album comes during the last refrain on the song Paint. The song is mostly quiet; a sparkling, melancholy guitar riff paired with soft, mournful vocals. The lyrics show the singer calling in sick from something, with a constant implication that they’re depressed, not physically ill. Near the end of the song the tone changes dramatically. The guitars grow harsh, the vocals are brought right to the front of the mix, and a line is delivered with more audible emotion than is present anywhere else on the record:

“I think I’m getting better”

It’s more aspiration than truth. But the conviction that Skye sings it with assures you that it will be true one day. The album isn’t about hating who you were before. It’s about what you’re striving for. About forcing yourself to heal, even before you’re really ready to do so. About refusing to lay down in self-loathing, refusing to do the same sad things over and over again, a refusal to become what the DIY scene is.

Downhill still bristles with self-loathing and self-pity lyrically. Musically, it still has emo cliches lurking just under the surface. It’s a rejection of emo as a genre, but it’s still an emo record. It’s a good one, with inventive song structures, fun sonic quirks like the samples and overlapping vocals, and, of course, it showcases some remarkable technical ability. But it’s an emo record. It needed a follow-up to assure us that Cheem were, in fact, “getting better”.

Part 2 of this piece, which is on it’s way, will be on Cheem’s 2018 release: Cheem TV.