Cartel - Cycles

Genre alternative Publisher Wind Up Records External Links

When I was younger a friend of mine and I found a bottle of buttermilk in the refrigerator. Being young and uninformed, we naturally assumed that a combination of two of our favorite things, butter and milk, would easily lend itself to the satisfaction of our budding buds. Now if you have ever actually tasted buttermilk, you know this to have been a mistake of rather tragic proportions. The actual taste of it is something I can only describe as homogenized rot, leaving a rancid film in my mouth that lasted for hours.

Enter the present day. I hit play on my cd player and Cycles, the third major release from Cartel, a five piece from Georgia that rode the coattails of bands like Jimmy Eat World and Something Corporate into a reasonable amount of success, starts up. At the outset, I did not have my hopes set very high.  I wasn’t expecting an audio feast. Just something that would be, at the very least, something reasonably digestible.  What actually spilled forth from my speakers was none of the sort. What ended up surging through my brain parts for the next half an hour and some change was something that was just as hard to swallow as a sour dairy byproduct.

All of the right elements are there. A high pitched and enthusiastic lead singer who is really pumped to get you pumped about whatever vague concept he's yelling at some vaguely defined audience? Check. An easily identifiable set of chord and song progressions, ie yellyell, breakdown,yellyell in slightly different pitch, yellyell like you did before, breakdown for the rest of the song? Check. A slight bit of electronic filler to fill in the musical gaps? Check. A keyboard chorus sing along? Check. Wrapping the whole thing up right before it gets very noticeably annoying? Check. Sort of. Though each individual song manages to end right before it itself becomes insufferable.  The one that follows it actually ends being more difficult to listen to than the last. By the time the last the last song loosed itself on me, I felt as if I had been the victim of a vicious personal attack by a group of derivative hoodlums.

Now I'm going to be fair.  I could listen to this type of music all day. It's just that there is nothing happening on this album that hasn't been happening for years on albums by the likes of Taking Back Sunday, The Used , New Found Glory, Fall Out Boy. The difference is that those bands seemed to strive to infuse their unique interpretation of the well worn staples of the genre with their own separate sensibilities. They tasked themselves with injecting some much needed personality into a form of music that was and is sorely lacking an abundance of such things. All I have ever asked is that those trying to be on the top of the playlists of the nation, have the decency to at least try and differentiate themselves from their peers. At this, Cartel have failed to a rather extensive degree. With little graying grandmas and long past strapped college students being charged millions of dollars for "stealing" music, it seems to me to be a little bit unfair that a band can sound almost exactly like 14 other bands and still manage to cultivate a profitable fan base. More than that, they somehow steadfastly avoid the heavy hand of a well deserved reprimand.

Not there aren't some mildly fetching tunes to be found on this album. I'm going to have "Perfect Mistake" stuck in my head all day. In the end, though, its just empty calories. It is indicative of what the genre has descended to. It has become a sick and infirm cousin of what made it great in the first place. Redundant, trite and worst of all, dreadfully and painfully boring, Cycles represents the culture at its most simultaneously yawn inducing and infuriating. As a result, it has now become the newest addition to the burn pile I've started in my back yard for the worst the world has to offer my senses.

Congrats Cartel. You've done nothing to glorify the genre and worse, I think you might have sent it sliding back a couple of steps. I can't think of anyone who I would recommend this to. Even the most die hard fan should be advised to move on lest they want the equivalent of audio buttermilk staining their brain.