The formula sounds simple: “I’d fill each track with a few layers of noise, then write a song to play under the noise.” This is how Paul, The Cherry Wave’s vocalist/guitarist, describes his early song writing efforts. Nothing much seems to have changed: the typical Cherry Wave song still consists of a really melodic riff under a dense technicolour cotton-wool blanket of fuzz over overdrive over distortion, with some added reverb and delay to firework everything into an atmospheric haze of soaring feedback and shimmering splinters and sparks.
Formed in Glasgow in 2012, The Cherry Wave have already released a demo cassette and an EP called “Blush”. Their music gives you the feeling of walking down the street in the early evening and overhearing a band sound-checking in some basement venue for a later show, and deciding you must go and see them. Only that the stumbled-across, overheard, strangely-compressed sound is the actual sound of the band. They sound like Dinosaur Jr. without the contrary drawl, The Jesus and Mary Chain without the cynicism, The Telescopes without the pseudo-complications, and just wonderfully and oddly without.
The song titles on the EP – Blush, Drown, Melt and Cave/Wave – economically encapsulate the disorienting physical/spatial feeling conveyed by each song, and recall the one-syllable obsession of classical shoegaze bands from the nineties. But where those bands sang about being absent, The Cherry Wave are simply absent about singing: the reverb-drenched vocals sound so far away and elusive that they’re almost not even there.
The Cherry Wave are now working on their first LP, and have recently released a new single, “Under Dull Grey Sky”, recorded live in their rehearsal room. The new song signals an exciting new development: its Swervedriver-like metallic kinetic noise sounds like it’s on the verge of utterly and completely falling apart. It creates an amazing sense of dangerous thrill. Can’t wait for the rest of the album.