Album Review: Donna Connone - Donna Cannone

I can get jaded by the number of people in music who are in multiple projects at the same time that all do very similar things. There's both a law of diminishing returns and familiarity breeding contempt, so at a certain point hearing what I've already hear so many times becomes tiring. In the case of Donna Cannone, the participation of Bjorn 'Speed' Strid does not fall into this category, because this is not just another band that he lends his voice to. He has become rather ubiquitous, but in this case he joined the band as a guitar player, which is the sort of shake-up that makes this interesting.

Or at least that was supposed to be the case. The rest of the band features a couple former members of Thundermother, a band I have to say has gotten better in their absence, if I'm being honest. Combined, the band's efforts sound a lot like The Night Flight Orchestra, but with just a hint less of the 'yacht rock' slickness to the mix. They are calling it power-pop, but we're splitting hairs what label we should use.

So why do I seem down on Strid's involvement? That is due to this band not really being as different from The Night Flight Orchestra as I was expecting, but also because that band's vocals sound a good deal like Strid's own, run through a filter. Even when he is not the dominant presence on a song, everything still has his feeling about it. That does away with much of the uniqueness I was looking for, and puts this album firmly in the camp of 'heard it before'.

The bigger problem, though, is that if this is what the band considers power-pop, it's lacking a whole lot of the 'pop' to it. Simply put, these songs aren't very catchy. They're trying, and it's not as if they want to be boring, but little about these compositions is going to hook you, or stand out as an earworm. The story goes that Strid heard the band practicing, and loved what he heard so much he had to join. I don't know what he heard, because I can't hear any of that on this record.

What I do hear is a record that sounds like the sort of thing a group of friends would have fun banging out in their rehearsal room. It doesn't feel like a fully fleshed-out record that knows what it wants to do, and has the ability to do it. "Is It True" is one of the softest numbers, and not only does that give it the strongest hook of the bunch, but it's a duet where Mia Karlsson's gravelly voice has tn times the character the band has on any other song. Perhaps bringing in a singer like her to front the band would have made all the difference. The band's identity is easier to hear when she is singing, and she's not even a member.

As a side-project, this is perfectly harmless stuff. It's a decent enough time to listen to, but because of who is involved, this record is going to get more attention than it probably should. It's decent at best, no matter what the pedigree behind it might be. I love great power-pop and pop-rock, and this isn't it.