I can't believe that I fell for this sort of music when I was a kid. Fourteen year olds all over the country will be labelling this as "punk", and I suppose that I would have when I was fourteen as well. What it really is, of course, is pop music, plain and simple, with the bouncy electro beat stripped out and some distorted guitar put in. But apart from that, it's got all the pop attributes, easily digestible choruses that can be sung along to, simplistic musical hooks, and for the most part, the same song structures and progressions that you've heard a trillion times before.

Not that this is a particularly bad thing, although I'd suggest that most of Cartel's fans, not to mention the band themselves, would take exception to being described as a slightly louder version of Britney Spears. Perhaps eager to set themselves apart from the rest of the poptart crowd, they like to inform you at every moment about just how much they rock. They achieve this by using the word "rocks" in the title of their website, blasting you with a horrendously compressed sample of their music when you go to their website (in my case, spoiling a perfectly good Joy Division song that I was listening to at the time), and wearing crumpled shirts and half undone ties. It's a remarkably obvious ploy, but it'll probably fool a fourteen year old.

And why wouldn't it, after all, a lot of money has probably gone into this album and this band, if the production job on "Chroma" is any indication. Each song is covered in a slick layer of audio lacquer, which takes the sharp edges off the distorted guitar so that little boys and girls won't hurt themselves with it. There's plenty of distorted guitar here, by the way, on practically every chorus, mixed up with some predictably shouty vocals from frontman Will Pugh. In fact, Pugh only seems to have two vocal modes; he's either shouting, in which case it sounds like he's just been punched in the stomach, or he's whining, where it sounds like he's about to be punched in the stomach. The shouting is definitely the less annoying of the two, but the whining generally only shows up in the verses, which seem to serve only to join two adjacent choruses together anyway. A prime example of this is Matter of Time, Burn This City, If I Fail, or any one of the other painfully generic pop-rock tunes that litter this album.

Hearing all this doom and gloom, it may surprise you to learn that there are still some saving graces to this album. The opening track, Say Anything is an acceptably crunchy piece of melodic pop-punk, and Luckie St., despite it's juvenile subject matter, is still a superbly constructed pop song. The Minstrel's Prayer, with its sweeping acoustics would have been a superb song if it weren't for its absolutely woeful lyrics ("Oh carry on/You minstrels of the world.", which sort of drag it down.

It'd be a lie to say that "Chroma" contains any real potential at all, but you could possibly get away with saying that Cartel might have a future. The few good songs on this album show that somewhere, underneath all the posing and posturing for their teenage audience, there's a decent rock band trying to get out. The best way that you can help it escape though, is by not buying this album, and demanding that the band grow up a little.