Reggie And The Full Effect – Under The Tray
(Vagrant)

Seriousness and pretention can ruin a band for me, even if the music itself isn’t half bad. How can one be expected to relate to an artist that is completely self-absorbed and out of touch with reality? On the other side of the coin, while “joke bands” can often do a great job of cutting rock stars down to size, their cheesy gimmicks and focus on humour can prove irritating after a while if they aren’t at least backed up with solid songwriting.

Get Up Kids keyboardist James Dewees has been rocking out with his tongue-in-cheek side project for a few years now, fronting a band known as Reggie and The Full Effect where yes, Dewees does indeed play the role of both Reggie AND the entire Full Effect. While few people can truly say they comprehend all of the inside jokes embedded within his songs, it’s hard to deny the infectiousness of the Weezer-esque rock riffs, sugar-coated vocals and quirky synthesizer noises they contain. The “Greatest Hits 84-87″ and “Promotional Copy” albums have quickly become universal classics for many indie rock kids, which set the bar rather high for Reggie’s next recording.

However, on his third full-length album, Under The Tray, Reggie has failed to impress me. Maybe it was all the hard time he recently spent in prison or maybe he just hasn’t been eating enough chili dogs lately, but for whatever reason he has become a victim of a classic pitfall: too much talk, not enough rock.

The main complaint people have about other Reggie and the Full Effect albums is that all of the eclectic sound clips and short joke songs ruin the flow of the real music. The ratio of real songs to jokes on this album is even lower than usual (less than half) and on top of this, very few of the real songs are actually good.

Many of the songs feature more fictional bands created by Dewees, such as Hungary Bear (some sort of death metal spoof), and Fluxuation (an 80’s synth-pop/New Order dig). The problem with the joke songs this time around is that many of them are 3 or 4 minutes in length, to the point where they are too long to be jokes anymore. Sure the song titles are cute and all, but in this regard Under The Tray works at about the same level as a Weird Al record. Do I need to hear these songs more than once in my life? Probably not.

Also interspersed throughout the tracks are snippets of a drunk girl from a Get Up Kids show rambling about various topics. It’s hard to hear what’s being said, and it’s not actually that funny (maybe you had to be there?). I kind of feel bad for the girl who is being mocked, to tell you the truth.

The only worthwhile moments on the album are the first 2 songs, “Your Bleedin Heart” and “Congratulations Smack & Katy”. Some of the other supposedly “serious” songs like “Image Is Nothing, Lobsters Are Everything” and “Megan 2k2 (Even Though It’s 2k3 Now)” find Dewees delivering cheesy ballads that are ironically close to his own spoofs, using electronic drums and bad vocoder effects. Go figure.

While humour has its place in rock music, there’s also a fine line between being witty and making an ass of yourself. While Reggie & The Full Effect have in the past managed to walk that line, this time around the joke is on them unfortunately. And personally I blame Reggie’s prison inmate Paco. — Sean