There is something wonderfully unreasonable about a band releasing its 27th full-length album and deciding that what the world really needs is not simplification, consolidation or a dignified summing-up, but another large, unruly organism capable of occupying an entire hour without once apologising for its appetite. CHEER-ACCIDENT have been doing this sort of thing since 1981, when Thymme Jones helped turn a name spotted in a Hallmark greeting-card display into one of Chicago's most stubbornly individual musical institutions. Since then the band's personnel have continually shifted, while Jones and guitarist Jeff Libersher have remained among the central figures in a practice that has moved freely between art-rock, progressive music, pop, noise, improvisation and the sort of compositional mischief that makes genre labels look like forms someone forgot to submit. "You Smile – The Song Is Over" does not attempt to tidy any of that history. It gleefully makes more of it.

The opening “Episode 34” is almost a warning disguised as an introduction: four and a half minutes are enough to establish that conventional song architecture will be treated here as a useful suggestion rather than a legal requirement. Then “Behind Your Smile” expands into a twelve-minute construction whose melodic passages, instrumental density and gradual changes of perspective suggest a band perfectly comfortable with taking its time, provided that time remains sufficiently populated. “They Won't Talk To Me” pushes the principle further, accumulating voices, winds, rhythm-section movement and abrupt changes in emphasis until the piece seems to contain several competing versions of itself. The presence of John Bruce Yeh, assistant principal clarinet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is particularly telling: the clarinet does not arrive as some tasteful classical ornament placed on top of a rock arrangement, but as another active colour in an already overcrowded palette.

That overcrowding is actually one of the album's great strengths. CHEER-ACCIDENT understand density differently from bands that simply pile things on. Instruments are frequently allowed to retain their own personalities, so that guitar, piano, drums, horns, strings, keyboards, percussion and voices can collide without necessarily being reduced to a single block of "big sound." The result is closer to a complicated conversation in which everyone has been given permission to interrupt. “The Next Fog” and “Incoming Angles” compress this appetite into miniature forms, while the seven-second “Moon Homecoming” is almost a practical joke at the centre of an otherwise lavishly furnished house. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient way of reminding us that duration is not the same thing as importance.

The longer pieces are where the band's peculiar balance between composition and instability becomes most persuasive. “Tin Pan Galaxy” can flirt with something approaching conventional melodic pleasure before CHEER-ACCIDENT begin moving the furniture around. “Graffiti Eyes” generates a nervous forward pull without surrendering its compositional control, while “The Blue Lie” is perhaps the album's most convincing demonstration of how much can happen inside a single extended form without turning the music into a mere catalogue of events. There is always a recognisable intention underneath the eccentricity. Even when the arrangements appear to be multiplying in different directions, the music retains an almost suspicious sense of proportion.

This is partly what distinguishes CHEER-ACCIDENT from the more predictable varieties of avant-prog. Their eccentricity is not based on permanent ugliness, nor on the assumption that difficulty automatically equals seriousness. They can be angular without worshipping angularity, sophisticated without sounding as though they have recently discovered the word "sophisticated," and funny without converting every musical decision into a gag. There are moments here where the band's fondness for pop, orchestral colour and straightforward emotional communication becomes just as important as the fractured rhythms and elaborate structures. The title itself carries that contradiction: "You Smile – The Song Is Over" sounds simultaneously affectionate and faintly threatening, as though somebody has just announced the end of the party while quietly plugging another amplifier into the wall.

The final stretch of the studio album makes that ambiguity particularly effective. “Absence Moving Backwards” creates a more spacious, reflective atmosphere, and “Epilogue” refuses the usual temptation to treat the word "epilogue" as an instruction to disappear politely. Then comes an edited version of “They Won't Talk To Me”, which makes the whole sequence feel less like a conventional conclusion than like a return to a previously visited room, except that the furniture has moved. CHEER-ACCIDENT are unusually good at this sort of circular thinking: endings become modifications of beginnings, fragments acquire retrospective weight, and a supposedly finished composition leaves behind the irritating suspicion that it might have another trick hidden somewhere.

The deluxe edition's DVD is consequently more important than the phrase "bonus material" would suggest. The two Chicago concerts, recorded at CheerAx Basement in 2022 and Reggie's in 2023, document the first officially released live performances in the group's history and reveal another side of the CHEER-ACCIDENT principle. On stage, the floating membership becomes a feature rather than a biographical footnote. The expanded personnel allow older material and newer arrangements to breathe differently, with guitars, brass, keyboards, percussion and multiple voices creating a much more physical version of the band's compositional logic. The CheerAx set moves through pieces such as “Learning How To Fly”, “Drag You Down,” “Humanizing The Distance” and “Even Has a Half-Life”, while the Reggie's performance ranges through “Heaven”, “Failure”, “You Know, You Know”, “Crazy” and an appropriately named “Improv”. Hearing these performances after the studio record makes the latter seem less like an elaborately constructed object and more like one possible configuration of a much larger musical ecosystem.

There is also something quietly impressive about the fact that a band formed in the early 1980s can still sound less interested in preserving its identity than in testing it. CHEER-ACCIDENT's history contains abrasive avant-rock, meticulously arranged pop, progressive complexity, improvisation, absurdist performance and numerous changes of personnel, but "You Smile – The Song Is Over" does not behave like an archive of those achievements. It behaves like a present-tense band record. The musicians are not demonstrating that they remember how to be CHEER-ACCIDENT. They are demonstrating that they still have no particularly strong desire to find out what that would mean.

Perhaps that is why the album's title is so apt. The song is over, apparently. Except there is another track, then another concert, then another version, then another turn in the arrangement, and eventually the whole thing has lasted long enough for the distinction between endurance and pleasure to become pleasantly unreliable. Some records ask for attention. This one keeps manufacturing reasons for attention to become impossible to withdraw. In an age devoted to shortening everything, CHEER-ACCIDENT have made an hour-long argument for excess, patience and the continuing usefulness of having far too many ideas at once. Human civilisation has survived worse strategies.