Good Charlotte
Cardiology
In 2002 the post grunge/pop punk album ‘The Young And The Hopeless’ nailed the name of its authors Good Charlotte upon the surface of the world thanks to the hook-laden sugar rush of it’s biggest hitters ‘Girls & Boys’ ‘Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous’ ‘The Anthem’, and the title track itself. Sure, some of it lacked any real depth or the means to be remotely challenging but I don’t think the intention was to resemble a particular kind of seriousness at this point anyway. What they did do though was to write an album that entered the mainstream with ferocious conviction and earned them the right to scribble their identity across the spine of popular music. The 2004 follow up ‘The Chronicles Of Life And Death’ veered from the poppy formula of it’s predecessor as they set out on their first effort, post-fame, to enhance the momentum and show a maturing versatility employing keyboards and moody string sections for their new-tech style of song writing. Three years later came fourth album ‘Good Morning Revival’, yet again a dramatic shift of pace and style from previous form nesting itself within the surreal environment of the synth/dance/club-punk movement.
So then new album ‘Cardiology’, their fifth studio recorded long player which, according to Joel Madden, is a return to ‘the punk roots of our past’ and implies yet another shift in musical direction - though this time the change is a backwards one - to the formula which brought them here in the first place. . Completion of the album had been significantly delayed after the band’s decision to completely scrap what they’d recorded with producer Howard Benson and start again this time with Don Gilmore at the helm. Love them or loathe them Good Charlotte know how to pack a song with large scale amounts of fuck-off catchiness and with Gilmore’s intuitive grasp spurring every half note on to be glorious it’s a confident stride of a record throughout. Pop punk is this band’s natural symmetry and it’s that precise context driving the new songs forwards, just as Joel Madden promised, and it’s once again the choppy power chord driven anthems they‘re known for. The sing-along compositions are present and correct - ‘Silver Screen Romance’ ‘Counting The Days’ and ‘Let The Music Play’ are standouts - new single ‘Like It’s Her Birthday’ mixes guitar with subtle bursts of electronica and ‘hey hey hey, oh oh oh’ harmonies. The Blink 182/ Sum 41/ Green Day influences can be heard but only in snatches, not right across the breadth of the album as some might have you believe - the intro to the very brilliant ‘Alive’ , as an example, with it’s immediate drum opening and heavy guitar, or the shimmering chord structures of ‘Sex On The Radio’ that sound a lot like Green Day’s ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams‘, but then what else can you expect from such a heavily populated musical genre? At times everything is going to resemble something that’s been done before - that’s just basic mathematics - but, and this is possibly where their least obvious strengths lie, they still make everything sound exclusively ‘them’. This is the sound of a band enjoying themselves again, enjoying making the music they make and enjoying writing the songs they write. Good Charlotte aren’t half as bad as you might consider them and this is a decent album - you just gotta give them a chance and this is that chance. You’ll probably like it enough to convince yourself that you don’t - but aint that just musical snobbery for ya - as if you ever needed reminding.
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