Person L Is Positive

Person L is an interesting band. This five member band from Philly would seem to have a doctorate in math rock judging by the first ten for fifteen minutes of their second album, The Positives. What they don't reveal in that time is that beneath their thesis for modern music lies the heart of a rock and roll band struggling desperately to get out. Fortunately, for everyone's sake it escapes and as a result Person L embark on a circumnavigation between the worlds of technical and gritty rock and roll.

To say that much of The Positives is complex would be an understatement. Person L is clearly a group that knows how to play and play very, very well. Finding melodies amongst a sea of riffs the band creates intricate atmospherics even when they are filled with aggression. This is technically brilliant stuff that surprisingly never gets lost amongst itself. That being said, The Positives, is truly an achievement in what you can do with music that is elaborate and highly structured.

At times sounding like Aloha meeting the Vue in a dark alley, the band gets it's rock and roll stuck in it's math rock with some pretty tasty results. From the opening notes of "Hole In The Fence," to the dirty slow moving gooves of, "Changed Man," Person L brings science to rock and roll and experiments with it successfully. If their hypothesis is that not all music has to be simple to be good, they've proven themselves correct ten times over. Understand, The Positives is an involved and abrasive record that rocks as hard as it theorizes about music and it's for that reason that this record is so impressive. Person L take rock and roll, let it go to college, and then force it to use it's new found smarts repeatedly for it's own good. The Positives is nothing but positively awesome; rock and roll has never quite rocked as much as it does here.