About two hours before doors at Station 4 in downtown St. Paul, a block-long line has formed of fans eager to hear a night of great live music. The bands are a pop-punker’s dream lineup: This Providence, The Summer Set, The Bigger Lights, and headliners Cartel. This is Cartel’s first tour with their new album Cycles and they are “just happy to be on the road again,” states bassist Jeff Lett. And apparently the mass amount of fans that keep arriving to the venue are happy about that too. 
Originating as a high school/college collaboration among three different bands back in August of 2003, Cartel has gained popularity and a large fan base over the last six years. With the current onslaught of a large number of teenage angst-driven bands to emerge lately, it’s pretty phenomenal for a band to last six years in this music scene, let alone release three successful albums within that time. With fans at the show from early teens to late 50s, the band has proven to have a catchy, unique sound that appeals to fans of all ages.
However, as popular as they have become over the years, there is going to be some scrutiny. Referencing the MTV miniseries “Band in a Bubble” (when the band spent 23 days in a partially transparent bubble in New York City and emerged having fully completed their 2nd full length album, Cartel), guitarist Joe Pepper adds, “We got a lot of publicity from that and with any publicity there’s people judging all the time. People really liked [the album] and with any album there’s always some hate, but I don’t think any of it affected any of us too much.”
Apparently not, considering Station 4 appeared to fill up to near capacity before the guys even took the stage for their set. The fans were eager to hear old favorites as well as new songs from Cycles performed live for the first time.
With a set list spanning equally across the bands 3 albums (Chroma, Cartel, Cycles) and including fan-favorites like “Honestly,” “Say Anything (Else)” and my personal favorite “Matter of Time,” the guys are partial to playing songs that are “close to home”, says drummer Kevin Sanders. “We love playing ‘Deep South,’ because it’s just so heavy. It has kind of become what “Georgia” and “Burn This City” were to us in the past.”
A recent label change from Epic to Wind Up Records has allowed the band a chance to be extremely unique within their new label family and express this “heavier” side. With labelmates like Creed and Seether, the band is able to get the deserved, undivided publicity that is sometimes lost in a label that is chock full of bands from the same genre. Pepper comments, “[Wind Up] doesn’t have a lot of bands that are like us. We don’t have to compete. When we were on Epic, we were competing with bands like Good Charlotte and Quietdrive; it’s time to get radio play though. They can push Creed and us at the same time and not have to worry about stepping on anyone’s toes. It just works out better.”
After a two year process of writing and recording, Cartel finally released their much anticipated third full length album, entitled Cycles, with Wind Up. With an album full of catchy, upbeat Chroma-esque tracks like “Faster Ride” and first single “Let’s Go,” ballad staples like “Only You,” and even some edgier tunes like “27 Steps,” Cartel fans will not be disappointed with their newest debut. Still holding on to the old Cartel sound of pop-punk power songs full of open ended messages, the band has proven to continue to step away from the cookie-cutter songs about high school love and loss and choose to write songs that are open for fans to define their own individual interpretations on the meanings.
With songs like Chroma’s “Minstrel’s Prayer” and Cycle’s “Retrograde,” Cartel continues to make the kind of music that allows fans to give a song a personal meaning that can adapt with every situation and shift into something completely different each time the hear a song. The band’s hook-driven music is the type that has staying power because it is so easily identifiable with each new fan that turns on their music and hears a song like “Save Us” for the first time. Even the album title can hold many different connotations. When asked about the significance behind the term “Cycles,” guitarist Pepper simply stated, “It means whatever you think it means.” That fan-powered idea is what has kept Cartel around and relevant for so long.
The band continues to keep their sights high, saying that a dream tour with include Van Halen. Now, I don’t know how compatible those two bands would be together, considering the crowd would be hilariously random, but could we be on the lookout for a tour collaboration with Van Halen? If the boys keep churning out hit-making music, nothing is impossible for Cartel.
Written by: Sarah Hassan
