If you enjoy lead singers with a vocal style that resembles a screeching bobcat with a throat infection, you just may like Alesana’s new CD “On Frail Wings of Vanity and Wax.” The CD, much like its overly dramatized title, offers very little in the way of levity or emotional positivism. Much of the album relies too heavily on the tired gimmick of sing-song verses, mixed with indecipherable guttural howls for choruses. The songs are clinically depressed almost to the point of parody. One of the tracks is actually titled “Congratulations, I Hate You.”

Consider this lyric from the track “Daggers Speak Louder than Words,” as an example of exaggeration for the sake of appearing tragic: “Eyes open to splattered blood/Cold tile mocks me as I arise/To find the knife is still in my back.” As tragic tales of heartache, death and mutilation are still in vogue with the hormone-laden youth, desperate for desperation, bands like Alesana are a dime a dozen.

Alesana has six members (because any less wouldn’t be as ‘epic’), with three of them (Dennis Lee, Shawn Milke and Adam Ferguson) sharing vocalist duties. What the members of Alesana might mistake as originality is, in fact, a tired example of genre plagiarism. The group picture of the band in the CD insert even depicts the members wearing the same white T-shirts and sporting the same moppy, black, overgrown hair that looks as if it was styled with a Flowbee.

“On Frail Wings of Vanity and Wax” is the perfect album to put on for your personal pity party. If the elevators in hell have ‘muzak,’ you can expect to hear this album playing. Some unsolicited advice for the next release: Ditch the yowls, embrace the absurdity of your genre with some bombast and try and entertain your audience instead of making it feel more depressed than before putting the album on.

Frank Miller can be reached at [email protected]