Benjamin Cartel walks with one foot in the deftness of the Americana sound, the other in the accessibility of more commercial concerns, making for an easy stride across the musical map as he makes music that appeals to discerning music aficionados and pop pickers alike. It’s a great place to be, a place where authenticity and artistry meet chart-smarts, where creative benchmarks are high but never so high that they leave the general listener behind. How could he lose?
“Spring Cleaning” is great, with spacious, countrified lines fired up by dramatic, drum-led lifts, so that the song ebbs and flows between delicacy and drive. And when Cartel wants to go big, it is not volume and velocity that he turns to but a wide-screen cinematic array. This is not a song that suckerpunches the listener with cheap sonic tricks; it cocoons them and carries them along in its wake.
It is dream-like, slightly psych-infused yet easy and accessible, and an echo of past classics wrapped in a totally contemporary vibe, the perfect balance of the cultish and the commercial. Benjamin Cartel might make music that seems to exist in the coming together of opposites, but the result of those opposites becomes so attractive in his hands.
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