by amy moore
When the opening sounds of The Cadets’ On the Death of Science as a Major World Religion filter through to a listener’s ears, it seems significant that no song comes bursting forth fully formed. Instead, there’s a slight shuffling sound. No, to be exact, not a shuffling; it’s more a preparatory shift of…what? A floor creaking, maybe, perhaps a guitar strap being adjusted, maybe drum sticks clasped in anticipation. The point is that the sound, while unrecognizable, is somehow familiar. It’s familiar because it makes you (the listener) picture the studio, or more likely, the converted bedroom, and you feel sort of comforted that this band is just like you in a way: sitting in a room, waiting for the start of something, perhaps accidentally making an unexpected sound. It’s the imperfection that’s so attractive—it seems to inject a humanity into the recording that isn’t always present in the polished, clean, and sterile end-products that can make you feel so impossibly distant from your usual icons.
Still, there is something distant about this album. But it’s the kind of distance you feel when you come across a thrift store audiotape of a static-y, unknown voice or an old, yellowed photograph with an earnest stranger peering out. It’s a distance that somehow makes you feel as though you’re peeking into a far away, but intimate moment—a distance that makes you feel secretly close to someone far away. These songs are strange and elusive—they were recorded in a bathysphere, they belong to an ancient scientific archive, they’re what you found when you switched to an unknown channel on your childhood walkie-talkie, they’re the soundtrack in a planetarium, they’re the note you found in the back of a school library book. The Cadets’ songs appear as secret transmissions suspended in time, waiting for the observant investigator to discover. In the song ‘Cowford – Promised Prince,’ the vocals swell and break in a way that is unique to the Cadets’ singer Chuck Smyth. While the lyrics bemoan the overwhelming loneliness of being abroad and alone, underneath, the music slowly grows from forlorn, intimate, and acoustic to an expansive production with otherworldly feedback, electric melodies, and even horns. The drums creep in bit by bit, and by the time the rim shots come in, you’re hooked into the fate of this desolated character “lost on land and in space.” The Cadets attack the encroaching loneliness by banding together, adding individual voices until the melancholy is defeated. I think it’s their best song, not only for the heartbreaking lyrics, but also for its perfectly matched instrumentation—echoing, beautiful, and vulnerable. What’s really nice about this album is that it does allow itself to be vulnerable. In doing so, it creates a strong aesthetic—one that seems almost anachronous in its innocence and hope. They implore a loved one to “take solace in his fortress of friends,” they wish to “wake up shoulder to shoulder, head to head,” they beg “wait up friends, aww wait up friends.” The charming sincerity is what most draws in the listener—the loneliness, the companionship, the voices in unison singing about a common experience. In trying to characterize this album, of course I must note that the musicianship and lyrics are driving forces, but the presiding factor seems to be the earnestness; it comes through in both the perfections and imperfections of the songs, the coughs, the sighs, the cracks and pops, as well as the intricate, layered sounds and carefully wrought melodies and lyrics.
It’s no small matter that Chuck, Chad, Cash, and Isaac are superior musicians, and their varied talents create a potent combination that accounts for musical shifts that can go from minimal and acoustic to electric melody to surf rock. Somehow these disparate styles work for The Cadets—they don’t come across as a group that’s not yet confident with its own sound. Instead, the variety of songs found on the album seems to indicate a group of musicians willing to take the risk of being both individuals and a group, which means Chuck’s crazy (in a good way) guitar and Chad’s carefully metered bass and keyboard parts can go hand in hand—likewise, Cash’s spastic, energetic drumming and Isaac’s technically adept guitar playing somehow seamlessly fit together. For evidence, see ‘Gainesville as Rarefactions,’ ‘The Ides of April,’ ‘Pax Cadetia,’ and of course, ‘Cowford – Promised Prince.’ There are horns and organs and strings and surf guitars and bagpipes and cheesy keyboards. It works, and what’s more, the exuberance is catching.
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