Album Review: Cash Cash – Blood, Sweat & 3 Years
2 min read
Brothers Jean Paul Makhlouf and Alex Makhlouf along with Samuel Frisch are Cash Cash – an electronic dance music trio hailing from New Jersey, and 2016 see’s the trio release their contemporary chart top destined full-length debut album – Blood, Sweat & 3 Years. Most notable for releasing the 2013 chart successful single Take Me Home, the trio started off earlier in their career utilising multi instruments in their studio recordings and live performances, which seemingly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when listening to this watered down, lacklustre effort – leaving the listener without speech for all the wrong reasons.
Contrastingly, their debut record see’s them more in a backseat producers light, relying on the collaborative measures taken on the 16 track full length. Boasting a number of heavyweight feature artists such as; Goo Goo Doll’s frontman Josh Rzeznik, Busta Rhymes, Nelly and B.o.B to name a few, the resulted album visits corners of semi-decent production whilst showcasing the trio’s inescapable and glittery hunger for commercial airwave domination. The big room vocals of up and coming singer Sofia Reyes in the album’s first track, How To Love are quite polished and refined but simultaneously, transparently generic and offer less of a standout quality as perhaps they could. This is, however, well suited for the cheap sounding, faux love sensation message endeavored in the track’s corrupted and sound effect concentrated instrumental elements. The EDM-heavy, stadium-pop intended direction taken on the record leaves the listener drowning in the same few note synth rises and flanger saturated drums, claps and “drops”. In spite of this, there is a minute gasp for air in the rapping additions added to the EDM-trap floor filler, with tracks like Devil, which features blue chip rapper Busta Rhymes and the track’s other rapper- B.o.B. This doesn’t last long, as the primary focus of the track falls on the depthless vocal hooks by Neon Hitch – releasing any forms of optimism in this attempted “hip-hop” track.
All in all, Cash Cash have presented without any real creativity, an album comprised of calculable, artificial pop music with forced momentum. Rather than channeling influence, the record mimics the work of predecessors like Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, and Afrojack by lacking any real aspects of individualism. While there are minuscule moments of decency, Blood, Sweat & 3 Years is a dance-pop progressive whirlpool of modern peak-time radio fillers which for the most part, spills immeasurable amounts of filtered mundanity and superficial predictability.
