The Failed Convict

Album Review

As a band uniquely blessed with a multi-pronged songwriting attack, steeped in everything from formative noisecore, to Southern sludge, to New England metalcore, to prog and post-metal, Connecticut's Cable have unfortunately found a way to miss out on all of those respective bandwagons, a measure of their praiseworthy nonconformity as well as a one-way ticket into the hall of overlooked artists. Yes, it sucks to be them! How else to explain Cable's existence on the commercial fringe despite a number of consistently impressive studio albums, now including this, their seventh, which concludes a five-year lapse since 2004's Pigs Never Fly opus. As was to be expected given this history for unpredictable creativity, 2009's The Failed Convict sees Cable shifting gears yet again and growing reacquainted with their noisecore roots by way of mostly shorter, simpler songs marked by gritty production applied to both their riffs and vocals so that those disparate musical veins cited above — and others — are mined only discreetly, just under the surface. In place of anything truly "epic" on par with some prior efforts, the bandmembers have connected these latest song-bites via a unifying concept about one man's prison experience and eventual escape, and so the occasional detours into the more melodious alt-rock of "Outside Abilene" (with spoken passages by Mike Watt and clean-sung vocals by Slacks frontman Christian McKenna), "Sleep Produces Monsters," and "Palm Sunday" provide other emotional nuances with which to spin their harrowing tale alongside tormented centerpieces "Gun Metal Grey," "Gulf of Texaco," and "Running Out of Roads to Ride" (all of which are part Amphetamine Reptile, part early Neurosis, part latter-day Black Flag). And so, although these cuts still lack the hit potential and single-genre conformity required to break Cable out of their exile in maverick-ville, they make The Failed Convict yet another laudable volume in their criminally underrated discography.