It’s quite possible to carve out a respectable career in many genres without songs that have hooks. Indeed, if you’re a prog-rock band, or a drone-pop band, or one of those noise-rock bands that DJ loves, not having any hooks is something of a badge of honor, a way of keeping the filthy hands of the unwashed masses off your beautiful, beautiful records.
However, if you’re, say, one of those emo/pop/punk bands that the kids all seem to like these days, you’d better have a fistfull of choruses that people can sing along with after only having heard them once, the kind that stick in your head like a giant meathook (no pun intended). And that’s really the problem with To Persevere, the first CD from New Haven, Connecticut band Aeroplane, 1929: a distinct lack of hooks. It’s never less than competent, but it’s never more than competent either, if you know what I mean — it doesn’t have anything that makes it memorable. I just put the album in again to review it, only to realize that I couldn’t remember any of the songs on it.
All of the ingredients are here for a good record. The instruments are well-played, and lead singer Alex Mazzaferro has the perfect voice for this kind of material, half-shredded and world-weary without spiraling into mere whininess. But the pedestrian songwriting drags the album back into mediocrity. It’s got a few moments, like the driving “Green with Envy,” where you can kind of hear what the album should sound like, but all of the elements never seem to gel at the same time.
I think that the second album will be better, because I saw them live after To Persevere came out and they sounded much more effective onstage than they do on CD, and their new songs sounded better than the ones on this album. For their sake — and that’s sincere, because I met a few of them, and they seem like genuinely nice guys — I hope so, because simply on the basis of what’s on the album, they’re unlikely to make much of an impression outside of the northeast.
Rating: 4/10
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[...] band Aeroplane, 1929. It’s far enough away from the rehashed emo-punk of their debut, To Persevere, that even though I had the promo CD case sitting in front of me, I might not have been entirely [...]