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Everybody knows New York is mostly just a bunch of rats that can smoke cigarettes and investment bankers waiting in line for $40 acai bowls. But in the sewers beneath that city lies Cheena.
"My room is just a bunch of Indian food, empty Narragansett cans and stinky socks full of semen, mid-2000s hardcore records and mice," says singer Walker Behl when asked to describe life in the Big Apple, "plus a bunch of floral-print jackets."
Leather freaks and thuggish psychopaths might recognize this flock of hoodlums from their previous bands. Cheena plucked its members from modern New York punk luminaries Crazy Spirit, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads, and the noise-freak project Pharmakon. Don't expect them to sound like any of that, though—with Cheena, they're slogging collectively down a new path.
Lazy idiots at vile rags like Spin compare the band to the New York Dolls just because the members wear vests and are from the New York, but anyone who's actually heard Cheena would be forced to agree they're actually the sonic descendants of the Flesheaters, a band who wore vests and hailed from Los Angeles.
"I don't expect someone who isn't a punk, or who didn't grow up like that, to really get it," Behl says.
All this is to say that they're not nice boys aping a pleasant old sound. Cheena just released its debut on Sacred Bones, a truly despicable LP called Spend the Night With…—and by despicable, I mean it's one of the best records I've heard this year. The standouts are "Jane," which has an early-'80s X feel, if only X had been on acid instead of dope, and "Electric Snoopy Gang," which sounds like a country song played by vermin dropouts.
Admittedly, though, while the songs are dirty, vile and shambling, these are still songs, with hooks and choruses, not just minute-and-a-half outbursts. It's the sound of a band in transition—from hardcore scum-babies to floral-print dirtbags.
"It's easy to be a dumbass and not have to worry about anything," Behl says. "Now I have to try." BRACE BELDEN.
SEE IT: Cheena plays the Lovecraft Bar, 421 SE Grand Ave., with Public Eye and the Ointment, on Monday, Aug. 22. 8 pm. $6. 21+.
Willamette Week