3 out of 5

Label: Divot Records

Produced by: John Congleton

Coming inbetween ‘Young Bodies’ and ‘Knives,’ one might expect c-a-d-u to be the crossover from the prior’s all-out noise assault to the latter’s introduction of quiet-to-loud that would become a larger aspect of the Paper Chase from disc to disc.  Yes… and no.  The bookends on this disc – opener ‘Press Any Key to Continue’ and ‘…The Unopened Email to God’ both display more of the dynamics that would come as the band shifted from hardcore to alt-rock, but Congleton is still very rooted to NOISE at this point, and can’t help but overstuff the tracks.  ‘Key’ has a pretty awesome intro of computery noises but segues into a weird acoustic section toward the end which greatly diminishes the impact, and doesn’t work as a successful linking piece to the group’s tradition of the second track being a rocker – and the rocker here, ‘This is the Return of the Don’t Talk Backs’ is, admittedly a fave – but ‘Unopened Email’ tries to reverse the trend by starting brash and peeling it back, and, similarly diminishing, on an EP that’s pretty noisy, the track comes across as unfinished instead of a positive change-up.  The middle three tracks are all at ‘Young Bodies’ fevered pitch and share a too-similar beat to stand out individually.  This all sounds negative, but the too-similar beat is a good one, John’s vocals are passionate as always, the production is much sharper than ‘Bodies,’ approaching the desireable stomp that Congleton would start to fall back on from here on out, and this is the first ‘themed’ PC disc, with a unique (for John) focus on technology instead of more organic destructors like nature and disease.  I don’t return to this EP too often because the payout-to-playtime ratio isn’t great (again, a lot blends together so it could almost be one song), but that doesn’t mean it’s a horrible effort.  The noisy approach works at length on ‘Bodies’ where the group can work with musical themes and overload more extensively, and the mishmash approach worked on ‘Knives’ because it had the time and space to give one time to digest.  In that sense ctrl-alt-delete-u is an inbetween, but it doesn’t feel like a snapshot of a stage in development for the group, moreso a bundle of ideas that got tossed onto an extended play while they were shaping up more solid material.