Cheer-Accident

Experimental rock bands walk on the edge of a knife. The razor-thin line that leads to transcendent music is easy to fall off of, resulting in either mere noise or self-indulgent wankery. Cheer-Accident (named after a line of Hallmark cards) has fallen off the knife a few times, but the band has stayed on the true path often enough to warrant a cult following and make it definitely worth a listen this Friday at the Creepy Crawl.

The band members' saving grace is their sense of humor, irony being the one thing that makes this generation of avant-rockers so much more tolerable than their '70s forefathers such as Yes -- not that there are many ways in which Cheer-Accident's stuttering math rock and spastic interludes can be compared with "Owner of a Lonely Heart."

In addition to not sounding like Yes, Cheer-Accident is also blessed with an embarrassment of local-talent riches to back it up at the show. As the relative straight men in the act, The Conformists will be content to simply kick your ass instead of blowing your mind, which will probably have already evaporated during the messianic hyper-rock of Skarekrau Radio and the noisy spazz-rock of Yowie. It'll be so on-the-knife you'll bleed.