Reggie and the Full Effect

In the late ’90s, the Get Up Kids keyboardist James Dewees started Reggie and the Full Effect to unleash some awesomely catchy, weird and really funny power pop on the world. He put out three catchy, weird, really funny records and then his wife divorced him. The result was the last Reggie outing, the very-not-funny Songs Not To Get Married To. A lot of fans balked at Dewees’s serious side but the record totally ruled, and they were stupid. Not so with Last Stop, another totally serious record that totally sucks. Following Dewees’s path to rehab, the songs chronicle his daily trips along New York’s subway line on his path to getting clean. While going to rehab is admirable, and documenting it in your music is probably a healthy idea, that doesn’t change the fact that this record is awful. There’s awful hardcore, awful ’80s pop and a song that’s just a minute of keyboard sample looping while someone whispers "sister.” It’s just so, so bad and the only half-decent song is a blatant rewrite of "Fought and Won One.” Lame.