Review:One Day by the Cactus Blossoms
The Cactus Blossoms’ newest release, One Day, proves that finding buzz as a copycat band only goes so far.
When Minneapolis-based duo, Page Burkum and Jack Torrey, hit the scene in 2015, they were eagerly welcomed into a bustling subset of retro country. Splashily produced with Americana heavyweight J.D. McPherson, the album, Your Dreaming, held interest primarily for its time travel quality to a certain 50s and 60s musical act. Brothers with meticulously gelled hair and dreamy harmonies? Check and check. The brothers effectively became The Everly Brothers reincarnated.
But as the band releases their third album, the novelty of replication starts to wear off. Though the tactic provides fast nostalgia and reactive initial press, much like Led Zeppelin clone Greta Van Fleet, holding attention further down the line is a harder feat.
The Cactus Blossoms return One Day is certainly an effort for change and departure, but the changes made feel more like stripping away rather than revitalizing. Gone are the heavy reverb and slow, crooning bridges. Taking with it the resulting versatile sound that toes the line between a conventional 60s throwback ballad nestled in time, and an eerie, otherworldly siren call trapped in time—earning the band a gig on the recent Twin Peaks reboot. When it comes to playing for a retro sound, the beauty is in the reverb, which is flattened in the new album.
One Day’s titular track bafflingly features what sounds to be a looped drum machine that remains stagnant and studio polished. “Lonely Heart” and “I Could Almost Cry” blend together on the tracklist, nearly indistinguishable from the other. These tracks seem to represent the band’s attempt at a happy medium of preserving some Everly Brothers’ twang and breaking off into genre rather than a carbon copy. The result is pasting on an achingly slow beat while the brothers alternate each verse. The choice to strip a large majority of harmonizing is likely an effort to avoid limiting comparisons, but they’re sorely missing regardless.
It’s important for an artist to branch out from the initial vision, particularly when comparison plagues a band. But when a new album takes the tentative step towards something new, it’s troubling when the listener finds themselves wishing for the old, less original sound.
The Cactus Blossoms could’ve easily followed in the footsteps of the reverb-heavy outlaw country of Orville Peck. Emphasizing the dream-like quality of their music may have served them to a broader audience looking for a haunting sound—the kind of unabashed embrace that recently landed Orville Peck the moody soundtrack for a tunnel drive in the wildly popular teen drama Euphoria. That’s one solution to The Cactus Blossoms’ crossroads.
The other is one already in the band’s reach with outlier track “Is It Over.” Three tracks into One Day after two dreary ballads comes a track that’s jolting and out of place. “Is It Over” is an addictive creation of 70s California sound that’s less like the Everly Brothers, and more like a descendent of Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line.” It’s two-and-half minutes of sunny bliss that is fit to play on a loop, but a glaring anomaly on a drowsy country ballad album. Though it sounds like an entirely new band, maybe the answers the Cactus Blossoms seek lies in emerging from the 60s and growing into the 70s, for all those nostalgic listeners of 2022.
Elisabeth Oster 