Cable Boy - Forever

Cable Boy’s first album Forever, contains thirteen tracks which are so quintessentially them. Their distinctive blend of gothic synths, grooves, and charisma, make up their self-described “goth-disco” sound. You can only gesture to their influences, the indie guitar lines of “Silo” like a paranoid Beach Fossils, or more obviously goth/shoegaze songs like “Something in my Head” and “Seen it all Before,” spanning from Bauhaus to bdrmm. Their strongest feature outweighs any platitudes about genre - the ability to write an earworm. Their hooks move from a ghoulish guitar (Icarus) to a warped synth (Trapped Alone), but are always something you can’t get out of your head. Anchored in this catchiness, all their lo-fi and ambient elements, cheeky asides, mad crashing cymbals, work together to make a compulsive sound. I cannot stop listening to “Let’s Go,” there’s something about Semilore Olusa’s half-whispered lyrics like half-threats, “Do you wanna leave?/Let’s go,” with the juxtaposing steady climb of the bass and slow cascade of the guitar. It’s on the fringes of the nightmarish without plunging too dark. I can’t tell if it makes me want to dance or run for my life.  Forever is a manifesto of bullet points; strong ideas, great writers, but they need connectives. It’s an excellent debut but it doesn’t always read like an album, more a collection of best hits (really really good ones though).