Reggie and the Full Effect
Songs Not To Get Married To (Vagrant)
by Marc Hirsh
Reggie and the Full Effect
Songs Not To Get
Married To (Vagrant)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Amplifier, May-June
2005
As the years pass, Reggie and the Full Effect’s
2000 album Promotional
Copy is seeming more and
more like a work of accidental genius than the result of sustainable
invention.
Songs Not To Get Married To continues
the downward slide, churning out vaguely satirical punk-pop and screamo
songs
that aren’t as memorable as even Promotional
Copy’s throwaway interstitials. With Get Up Kids keyboardist
James Dewees newly
divorced and officially admitting his responsibility for the entire
project, Songs sounds as though his Reggie, Klause,
Fluxuation and Hungary Bear personas are fighting for their very
existence on
the battlefield of his mind. They bleed into one another in the process
of
killing each other off, seemingly propelling Dewees in the direction of
a total
psychological breakdown. It’s like The
Wall, but not as funny.