Persona

Hard-Work for Hang-Ups (2005)

Jordan Rogowski

There's a definite problem if your band cannot provide a single memorable moment in almost 40 minutes time. That's 40 individual minutes to make some sort of magic happen, to leave a mark or imprint in the head of whoever happens to be listening. Some bands can do it in 20 seconds, others 20 minutes, but if I can listen to all of a record, and not remember a single solitary moment of it, that's an issue.

And it is an issue, at least with Persona's Hard-Work and Hang-Ups. In fact, the only thing that I do remember about the record was the headache I subsequently gained after listening. The band's ability to create my headache was a real team effort, a combination of obnoxious and flagrant synthesizer use and terribly off-key vocals.

Singer Joseph Melchiorre's approach isn't even so much singing as it is just wailing. Just one line of the singing evokes an image of some eccentric man flailing his arms about while he sings as loud as possible, with no real pitch or inflection to strive for. It doesn't seem so bad at first, but the more you listen, the more it grates on your nerves, to the point that it's so detrimental to the music as a whole that you simply don't want to look past that for anything else the band may be doing well. I bet these guys consider themselves to be "sassy."

As I mentioned before, not a single song sticks out, instead everything just molds together into one, long, extremely-hard-to-listen-to track. The jangly guitars can be enjoyable, but only for a little bit at a time, and even then they're usually overtaken by that irritating synthesizer or some equally irritating keyboard work. "Bad Blood" epitomizes my example of everything that goes wrong on this record, as what begins with some quirky riffing is quickly accosted by the deadly one-two vocal-synth punch. It's enough to make you give up on not only the record, but the music altogether.

That's it, I'm done, just make it go away.