Nobody writes lyrics like Cheekface.
The L.A. band of Greg Katz, Mandy Tannen and Mark Edwards has won my heart over and over and over again, pretty much every time they release new work. The best way I can think to describe it is if Steven Wright or Mitch Hedberg were songwriters. Some examples:
- When life hands you problems, make problem-ade.
- The difference between me and a dog is, I am taller.
- Great minds think a lot, and so do ours when it’s boring.
- For the garbage man, election day is still garbage day anyway.
Like Wright and Hedberg, there’s some pretty deep stuff underneath that other stuff you’re laughing at. On the single Cheekface released this week, “Popular 2,” it’s self-surveillance and social media and raging against the death of privacy before giving into it completely. But, you know, funny.
I just want to be popular to watch
In the movie you put on from the camera on your porch
Your across-the-street neighbor walks his dog on TV
The future is now, unfortunately
The dystopian hellscape we’re all living in goes down a lot easier when it’s attached to one of the catchier tunes from a band with a catalog full of catchy. It’s bright and bouncy and, as Katz noted in a statement accompanying the release, has a guitar line “a little inspired by the verse guitar part in Van Halen’s ‘Panama.’ RIP Eddie.”
“Even though I’m worried about the surveillance state that the government has set up, and many of us rightly think it’s a tool of state oppression, we still spy on our own friends and neighbors and total strangers through our own means that we’ve set up ourselves,” Katz added. “And just like the government, we develop our own paranoiac theories about what those people are doing, but we’re really maybe just reflecting our own loneliness.”
But, you know, funny.
