Album review: Person L – The Positives

So, according to the infallible intertubes, Person L are fronted by one Kenny Vasoli, formerly of The Starting Line; apparently he got “frustrated with the limitations of pop punk” (which is something I can sympathise with), and decided to start a new band (and his own label) to do some different stuff. The Positives is the second Person L album, and it’s not too bad at all.

That said, Person L’s roots in emo-pop are clear to hear, especially in Vasoli’s earnest and personal (if occasionally abstract) lyrics. But in place of pop-punk’s bouncy full-throttle pace, The Positives tends toward more stately tempos and spacious grooves, with simple instrumentation sketching deceptively simple figures. There’s more than a hint of the post-rock about it in places, with very little distortion or conventional “heaviness”; reverb and delay is the order of the day, plus some nicely restrained keyboards set to organ and Rhodes patches. (The world needs more Rhodes piano, y’know.)

That said, it’s not all entirely mellow; “Goodness Gracious” has a hint of hard-rock crunch and riffage about it, plus some ballsy brass stabs, and “New Sensation”, “Sit Tight” and “Changed Man” are like road-house radio-bl00z-rock reinterpreted for a new generation. Vasoli doesn’t sound quite so convincing in this mode, but the guy sure has range… and you know what? It’s fun. It’s honest, and a bit goofy. It doesn’t have that tiresome trying-too-hard vibe that seems to be ubiquitous in modern pop of every stripe. I’m not sure that I’d go out of my way for it, but it’s far from unpleasant.

Tracks like “Stay Calm” are a bit twee, like an American act trying to deconstruct Jarvis Cocker without having the context of the class divide in northern England to inform the work, or a Blur clone without the cynical undercurrent. But a bit of variety makes a pleasant change, and that’’s probably the thing I like most about Person L. The Positives is an album by a band who didn’t feel constrained by fashion or convention, and I’d rather see a band try something new and fall on their faces than stick to the straight and narrow, the tried and tested. Not my new favourite band by a long shot, but one I’ll watch out for nonetheless.