The Creem - Taste of Cherry
Flood Magazine: First Listen
A Taste of Cherry is a dialed-in debut, born from a deep reverence for song craft and the alchemy of collaboration. The Creem, formed by Mike Stroud (Ratatat) and Nick Thorburn (Islands), arrives on the scene fully realized, as two friends who’ve channelled years of experience into something immediate and undeniable. The Creem comes careering out of the gates with this propulsive debut, gripping tightly and never letting go.
Stroud and Thorburn met back in 2004, but lost touch in the ensuing years. Thorburn explains how this collaboration came to be:
“I’d actually emailed the Ratatat account back in 2006, asking if Mike would be willing to play guitar on an Islands tour. I had assumed Ratatat had broken up and was in need of an extra guitar. I was a fan of Ratatat from the beginning and even referenced the melody to their song “Cherry” on the first Islands album.”
Thorburn never got a response, but some things take time to come together. In 2019, Stroud reached out from out of the blue that he was in Los Angeles for a few days. Thorburn was in the studio recording a song for an upcoming Islands record and asked if Mike would come and play guitar on the track. The session was fun and Mike offered to do more recording.
“I went to Mike’s studio in the Catskills where he produced an Islands song. We got along so well, musically and otherwise, that when Mike shared some incomplete songs, asking if I’d be interested in collaborating, I jumped at the chance.”
Cherry is an embarrassment of riches, replete with tender hooks that burrow in your brain like a beetle, wry words that carry your heart away like a big ship, and mastodonic melodies that rip your face off like a riled up T.Rex.
Stroud’s shimmering guitar lines—sharp edged, heart-rending and irresistibly mesmeric—lift the songs skyward, but Thorburn’s earthbound lyrics—funny, aching and quietly devastating—bring them back home. Stroud’s production is both glossy and off-the-cuff, with tasteful cellos, spritely vocoders, whipped cream canister percussion, and harmonies that reach for the sublime, like “teenage symphonies to God”. At once familiar and strangely new, the resulting sound from The Creem is timeless and evocative without resorting to cheap nostalgia.
That timelessness extends further: Each song on the album is a fade out, suggesting that the music never ends. The songs go on forever, spinning through space and time, beyond the listener’s experiencing, only repeating in your mind, long after any sound stops playing.