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Persona Non Grata is the twelfth studio album from venerable thrashers Exodus and if I wanted to be flip, I’d write, "sounds like Exodus" and leave it at that. I guess I should be a little more descriptive, so here goes. Persona Non Grata has all the hallmarks you’ve come to expect from these Bay Area stalwarts from the sharp guitars to the metronomic drumming to the grating vocals. The level of precision with which Exodus performs the songs on this album is a long way from the wild savagery of Bonded by Blood, but very much in line with their output since the turn of the millennium. Steve "Zetro" Sousa has always had a great thrash voice but here he sounds strangely and eerily similar to David Wayne from the early Metal Church albums, not that that is a bad thing. The songwriting is where Persona Non Grata loses me. It is solid but formulaic to the point of being generic. There are riffs that have the Bay Area/Metallica DNA and lyrics about the injustice of society and none of it stands out much, with the exception of the backwoods blues of "Cosa del Pantano." I’m not saying I like this song, because I tended to skip it after the first few listens, but it is different. Exodus is a band that’s been around far too long to release an album that is total crap, and I really enjoyed their last one (Blood In, Blood Out) but I find the songs on Persona Non Grata to be little more than boring and faceless Bay Are thrash.