The influences of Cheating Kay are quite clear when listening to their album, Concept. Early Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, Massive Attack, Portishead, 10,000 Maniacs, Dead Can Dance, Coldplay and U2 are all apparent. All well and good, I hear you say (well, apart from Coldplay), these are all fine or great bands, and if Cheating Kay are some glorious chimera of them all then, hell, I should go out and buy/steal/burn/borrow the album straight away.
So you come into ownership of the album. The design is nice enough, the minimalist cover with its circuit diagram, continued on the back. But on the back something seems amiss. The song titles (You Can Never Get Out, Be The One, A World Without Heroes) are a little saccharine, a little.... mainstream. Not a problem, just because a song title has been used that could have been thought up by a Backstreet boy, doesn't mean that the song itself will be shit. After all, you can't judge a book by its cover, but then again, you CAN judge a ship by its hull.
Listening to the album you begin to get the idea. Tom Mueller and Sarah Magill Mueller share lead vocal duties. Both have nice voices, and are backed up ably by Mark Lomas on drums and Curt Cuscino, who contributes turntable and programming wizardry. The band's playing is tight and accomplished, and they use their multi instrumentalism to give their songs an eclectic feel, combining trip-hop, rock and electro-pop. But the problem lies with the material. The songs are uniformly nice. Lyrically they are poor and predictable : ' Corporate blues can tell little lies / all are bought with a price.' It's like a seventeen year old with a conscience whose just read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo.'
Back to the subject of influences. Great artists, including some of those I listed at the beginning, encouraged their invention partly by specifically not listening to music similar to their own. For instance, Kid A was hugely influenced by the work of Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. Bitches Brew was in turn influenced by the work of the great modernist composer, Stockhausen. Miles Davis was always dismissive towards artists that were compared to him, especially Wynton Marsalis, no doubt a great jazz trumpeter, but someone who added nothing new to jazz itself. Davis always felt his heirs were people like George Clinton or Prince, both inventive, ground breaking artists. So Cheating Kay, like similar acts such as Coldplay, or Turin Brakes, are an amalgamation of all that is obvious and anthemic about their favourite artists, adding nothing new to the genre and taking their place in an already over crowded and unnecessary niche. |