Reggie and the Full Effect, Last Stop: Crappy Town

What the hell happened here? Granted, it’s been a while since I checked in with the band, but the last time I checked, Reggie and the Full Effect was a whip-smart, self-referencing, sarcastic-ier-than-thou cold shower of a “project” that didn’t take itself (or the music it appropriated) at all seriously. And that was the beauty of ex-Get Up Kid James Dewees’s music, in large part — it jabbed a vicious stick into the self-important windbag of emo/post-emo rock and deflated the overblown thing a bit, at least.

This time out, though, the sarcasm’s been leashed, the grinning, electro-emo slaps at the cheesiest of the alt-rock set are under wraps, and things feel a hell of a lot more, well, serious. Last Stop: Crappy Town is no ball of fun, but rather a bitter, loud, angry blast of post-hardcore rock — it’s about halfway in the screamo camp, with the growly vocal thing and snarling guitars, a bit math-y, with some nicely jagged rhythms (drummer Billy Johnson probably deserves the credit for being the best part of this disc, by the way), and a third or so real-live emo. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of stuff like this, but it’s honestly nothing special, just more loud rock to throw on the too-high pile.

Weirdly, the softer stuff is what I’m finding the most appealing (okay, I am an emo cheeseball at heart, so maybe it’s not all that weird). The tracks I like best are ones like “E,” which is sweet, Weezer-meets-Mae melodic rock that’s got an endearing, Jimmy Eat World-ish earnestness that I can’t help but smile at. There’re also some nice moments towards the album’s end, where Dewees and company apparently decide they want to be Muse and channel their inner Freddie Mercury for some dark, arena-level rock (“N,” and to a lesser extent, the Nine Inch Nails-esque “V”). Most of the rest of the album is dominated, though, by the aforementioned heavy-ass hardcore, which makes me wonder if Dewees is really hankering to return to his Coalesce roots.

The one throwback to the old Reggie and the Full Effect is “J” (or is it “J Train”? can’t tell…), which does a pop-punk thing for a while before dropping back into crushing volume, but there’s still a fairly big problem, one that affects a lot of the songs on Crappy Town: the lyrics are horrible, just flat-out awful. Which could be okay, if this were, say, Promotional Copy. It’s not. And they’re just not working for me. Put it all together, and I’m left with an album that’s not great, occasionally good, and mostly just okay.

There’s a part of me that wants to think I’m just missing the joke, that this really is the same band/whatever and Dewees is having a big laugh at my expense for me bothering to listen to this set of just-okay alt-rock. Sadly, I think that’s just me trying to rationalize a lackluster album. I mean, c’mon: the pretty classical interludes? The lack of real song titles? The lyrics that sound like they were written by a mopey high-school kid? For whatever reason, it looks like Reggie & friends have finally drunk the Kool-Aid and become the very band they used to make fun of.