Paperface

Paperface should be very, very happy. One of their songs was selected by Sony to be preloaded onto one million MP3 players, so in theory they should have a captive audience just waiting to fall in love with them. Except for one little thing: they aren’t very good. Thank goodness Sony MP3 players don’t really sell particularly well. The band consist of two brothers — Chris and Andrew Merritt — and they classify their music as piano-driven rock. Naturally, there have been some comparisons with Ben Folds because of the piano, but that really isn’t fair on Mr. Folds because Paperface lack both his lyrical and melodic abilities. Not only that, they just don’t know when to stop; songs go on far too long with drawn out sections that have more in common with jam bands than pop songs. The Legend of Harley Knowles is a not very good album, recycling clichés from ’70s AM radio, then making it worse with poor production and performances. A truly awful record.