I've interviewed Cartel lead singer Will Pugh twice now, and both times he's spoken about how his band is bringing something new to the genre.

After experiencing the pop punk band's performance Tuesday night at Lulu's Nightspot, 129 1/2 S. Pugh St., I have come to the conclusion that Pugh has no idea what he is talking about.

Pop punk has been around for a little while now, but as far as I can tell, Cartel does nothing that a slightly above-average pop punk band does. It looks the same, sounds the same. If Cartel is leading any sort of musical revolution, then you can call me King George.

If he's trying to revolutionize, Pugh is in the wrong genre for two reasons.

First, pop punk is a style of music in which an affected vocal style has always masked a lack of singing ability. Certainly there are good singers within the genre -- and Pugh is one of them -- but it doesn't offer a lot of room to show off.

Second, punk music -- the forebear from which pop punk was derived -- was supposed to be revolutionary from the get-go. And in a lot of ways, it was. What we have now, though, is watered down and innocuous. Most worrisome, it champions commercialism over any actual innovation.

I'm not trying to knock Pugh here. He's actually a really talented singer, and his voice holds up as well live as it does recorded. Even on the few songs he played third guitar, his vocals absolutely carried the performance.

Cartel as a whole isn't even a bad band. It's never embarrassingly bad and, at times, it's even catchy. Tuesday, the band was tight and energetic -- about all you can ask from a live band -- and the hundreds of kids in attendance certainly enjoyed the show, singing along loudly to the band's cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall" during the encore.

The band even played a new song from the album it plans to record this summer, and I'll go so far as to say that if this is the direction the band takes with the rest of its career, I'll take back most of what I've just written.

The problem is that the rest of Cartel's set, which featured a well-balanced mix of songs from both of the band's albums, ran together. From talking to fans of the band, people are split on which album they like better, to the point that many simply refuse to listen to one or the other. To me, though, all the songs sounded similar and, although the band played with a lot of energy, the set lacked dynamism.

There are certainly more generic bands than Cartel, but it has set itself up for failure when Pugh runs his mouth -- at least when he does so offstage; as I said, on stage, he's got killer pipes. He has the talent, he has the ambition: Why does he make kids' music?