SIMSBURY, Conn. — Local NFT enthusiast Harris Woods was dumbstruck at a Chili’s on Saturday night when after years of being shot down, his pickup line actually worked, confirmed multiple bystanders.
“I went with the old standby of ‘everyone says dating is a numbers game, so can I have yours? and I was just about to rip a huge fart to leave her with as soon as she gave me the cold shoulder, but she did something I’ve never seen before,” said the 32-year-old. “Instead of telling me to ‘fuck off’ like a normal woman, she just laughed, shrugged, and said ‘sure.’ There I am, with a fart chambered and ready to go and I was caught a little flatfooted. What kind of mind game is she playing? I mean, this is where I normally would call her ugly and say I didn’t actually want her number anyway, but she threw me such a curveball. I wasn’t prepared.”
Vanessa Palmer, the woman who caught the attention of Woods, admitted she was open to hearing what else he had to say.
“He’s kinda cute and the pick-up line was so bad it actually made me laugh so I figured it was worth a shot,” said Palmer. “But then he just started sweating, licking his lips, and quietly singing DJ Khaled’s ‘All I Do is Win.’ I get it, it’s intimidating out there these days. But when I asked to see his phone to put in my number, he slapped my hand away and accused me of trying to steal his identity. Eventually, he just walked back to his friends and tried to high-five them. It seemed like they had to explain to him that our interaction wasn’t over. But when he came back, he just kinda looked at his feet, and mumbled something about the newest ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ movie being too woke.”
Head of Sociology at UConn, Lee Hernandez says this is becoming more and more common.
“We’re seeing lots of guys like Harris spend thousands of dollars at Pickup Artist seminars, but none of those seminars tell you what to do if it goes well. This is likely due to the fact that anyone who calls themself a ‘Pickup Artist’ has never actually had sex. Or gotten to second base,” said Hernandez. “In fact studies have shown that a surprising amount of straight-identified men in the US think that sex is just explaining to a woman how much of a genius Christopher Nolan is.”
At press time, Palmer had moved on and Woods was seen Googling “How does one lay pipe?”
First of all, how badass is it that Elliott’s debut studio full-length album “U.S. Songs” has an instrumental song called “Intro,” AND it’s track two on the actual record? Whoa! That’s really heady. Anyway, the band’s sophomore LP “False Cathedrals” gets way more flowers than its predecessor, but without “U.S. Songs” there would be no false cathedrals, true synagogues, calvary songs, or Australian Vegemite Silverchair cover melodies. Louisville, Kentucky is more known for whiskey than emo, but hopefully more emo awareness can change that ever so slightly in Elliott’s emotional favor even though Bourbon is pretty good and tasty even if it isn’t either. Sadly the band split up approximately five years after “U.S. Songs” came out, but happily the band reformed in 2022, and played Birmingham, Alabama’s Furnace Fest that year with acts like Sunny Day Real Estate, Stretch Arm Strong, Poison The Well, and Nancy Sinatra.
What the hell, world? Why does Seattle, Washington’s Engine Kid have only 572 monthly listeners on Spotify as of press time, AND why doesn’t the band have a freaking Wikipedia page, for Christ’s sake? These two stats prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the band is the most underrated of the batch here, and we have you to blame! Yes, you. Want to fix this? Get each of your two friends to listen to “Angel Wings” and tell them to tell their two other friends to do the same. Math is fun. Engine Kid might be one of the harder to define acts here, but their hybrid multigenre sound truly needs your ears, hearts, time, and special goodness. We blame 1995’s incredible hard rock year with acts like Rancid, The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, and KC and The Sunshine Band for stealing EK’s thunder.
Orange County, California’s melodic hardcore masterminds known as Farside, and not Far (who also kick a ton of ass but weren’t on Revelation Records) formed in 1989, and previously included Rage Against The Machine’s Zach de la Rocha like the aforementioned Inside Out from 1990-1991, just not on vocals, so they’re included here. The band released several EPs, LPs, and even a compilation before their swan song “The Monroe Doctrine,” and said LP closed out the ’90s in style. Fans of non-RR bands Seaweed, Lifetime, Samiam, and early-Debbie Gibson before she sold out will LOVE this record and its predecessors and so will you. The band split up in the year of our lord known as 2000, and we don’t foresee any reunion dates unless Riot Fest ponies up with a large Zelle deposit; there’s a light on in Chicago, so come now. We hope you’re happy.
Not only is New York, New York’s Judge’s “Bringin’ It Down” the band’s hippest album title with the apostrophe to prove it, it is also the oldest LP referenced here with a late-1980s release date. In addition, the band is also easily the heaviest mentioned. But not in terms of mass, and proved said girth by being openly/militantly straight edge. Such ethos may turn off many a la Minor Threat, but we’re just happy that the band has such strong and literally sobering convictions; you can tell the band that they make no difference but at least they were (expletive deleted) trying. Even the band’s logo, their clobberin’ time “X” that rivals Burger King’s golden arches, is intimidating. The band released one more EP, “There Will Be Quiet…,” via Revelation Records before breaking up in 1991, the year that grunge infected the world, but reunited twenty-two years later.
One of two releases listed here from the 2000s, Long Island, New York’s The Movielife has had their fair share of drama through the years, but with a statement like the nearly thirty minute sophomore one-off full-length studio album “This Time Next Year” for Revelation Records, does it matter? We. Think. Not. The band eventually signed to Drive-Thru Records and rode their storm shortly afterwards with a sick EP and even sicker album, but surprisingly is forever underrated with both fans and mainstream appeal, and certainly got far less love than DTR superstars New Found Glory, The Starting Line, Hellogoodbye, and The Pointer Sisters. Despite what you may think, we don’t hope that you die soon, we do wish that you weren’t ten seconds or more too late, and that you donated more of your precious time to this band’s DSPs and upped their streams/sales.
Another underrated Long Island band that never got mainstream adoration, easily even more so than the aforementioned The Movielife, is forever marred with tragedy in every sense of the word with the way-too-soon loss of vocalist/guitarist Jason Rosenthal just ten years after the release of the newest Revelation Records entry here, “Sirens.” Sadly the band hung their hats just one year after “Sirens” was released, and came back for random shows here/there until Rosenthal passed away. Happily the band reunited late last year with Rachel Rubino of Bridge & Tunnel (a fun Long Island reference) on vocals. Hopefully they will record new music together, but at least we’ll always have “Sirens.” If you have the chance, and we know that you do, check out the remastered version of this LP which also came out in 2023, twenty years after its initial release.
Southern California’s Sense Field’s perfect album “Building” has the distinction of being our favorite LP here, which combined with six dollars and fifty cents can buy you a cup of coffee in Los Angeles, but like On the Might of Princes, forever has a sad asterisk attached to their legacy with the death of vocalist Jon Bunch twenty years after its release. In the light of things, a solid post-hardcore blueprint for kids of all ages, “Building” succeeded at making both sensitivity rock hard and rock more endearingly sensitive. The band would have a minor hit with “Save Yourself” from their non-RR Nettwerk Records 2001 record “Tonight and Forever,” but tragically Bunch’s demons didn’t work in saving himself; perfect dream outlives the man. If you had a chance to go to one of the benefit shows for Bunch’s son Jack, you who witnessed some insane vocal features.
Most certainly one of the better and more underrated punk rock records of the ’90s, Shades Apart’s “Seeing Things” unknowingly overcame their blatant DSP in its album title typo years later with their second Revelation Records LP release. Shades Apart often doesn’t get discussed with the same reverence as others in the oversaturated and many times meh genre, and we’re here to change it for you and everyone that you know. An effective power trio from extremely ineffective New Jersey, SA rode under the radar but did so in a noteworthy fashion, and eventually won the suits over at Universal Records. We’ll never know what could have and would have happened had “Seeing Things” been a major label release, but that’s what makes horse racing. Also, track two, “Fearless,” is a standout song from the already standout aforementioned “In-Flight Program: Revelation Records Collection ‘97” label compilation.
New York, New York’s Texas Is The Reason as an entity and their literal lone full-length studio effort, “Do You Know Who You Are?” which is potentially named after the last words that John Lennon heard after being viciously executed by Mark David Chapman, both may not be underrated to you, the extremely educated and always objectively and subjectively correct reader with impeccable taste, but if you ask an average pedestrian if they’ve heard of this band, you’ll likely hear crickets or some derivative low hanging fruit joke about San Antonio or El Paso. Sadly Texas Is The Reason imploded shortly after they started, and we know that if they stuck around despite internal conflicts, they would’ve had at least 1996 more songs by now, and may have been spoken in the same sentence in terms of impact as peers Jimmy Eat World.
Let’s end this piece with a more than welcome female spin in a typically overly male dominated rock genre: Southern California’s Whirlpool, formed as a rock and roll side project from the previously mentioned Sense Field’s Rodney Sellars, is easily the second most underappreciated band listed here next to Engine Kid, and “Liquid Glass,” the band’s second and final full-length, has cool cover art and even radder songs. Anyway, how this act didn’t rise to the fellow femme heights of contemporaries The Breeders, that dog., The Juliana Hatfield Three, and Robert Johnson is a question that we will forever ask ourselves. Please don’t confuse the band for Chicago, Illinois’ Whirlpool, a jazz trio that is cool in their own right, but way less post-hardcore, pre-hardcore, or nardcore. Trouble!
Nobody knows how to make a scene quite like Mr. Scarface himself, Tony Montana. So whether you’re watching your empire crumble from behind an absurdly large mountain of coke, or just watching your dreams slip away from behind a moderately sized mountain of Kraft Mac and Cheese, yelling this line will help folks remember that all you have in this world are your balls and your word! And that word is “Help!”
Watching a coworker have a breakdown at work? Witnessing a family member drink themself to death? Just see footage of an international atrocity? Let everyone around know that you’re also not doing great by pointing to whatever awful thing just happened and reciting the classic “When Harry Met Sally” line about orgasms. Inappropriate and concerning!
While half of Jim Carrey’s daring performance gave a nuanced look into the life of what nowadays would be called an incel, everyone mostly remembers his flashy and charismatic lines as The Mask, a violent pervert who was really stoked about the ’90s swing revival. Is your family paying attention yet? Just repeat it over and over, with more desperation. They’ll get the message.
Are you dealing with a mental health crisis akin to a space shuttle disaster? Then blast off into the arms of our broken healthcare system with this classic ’90s film reference to let everyone know that all systems are not go in that little Apollo 13 you call a brain.
Yeah, there’s pretty much no way that won’t sound creepy. Honestly, just the word “delicious” is right on the edge for me. But “deliciously”? Get the fuck outta here. Actually this line from the 2015 horror masterpiece “The Witch” might genuinely be too much. I mean… people will definitely pay attention. But while it was a cult hit, I’m not sure they will get the reference. So you might just end up in jail. Slay!
Sure technically this line from Die Hard is written on a shirt of a dead man and not spoken, but we’ve got a feeling that whoever you say this to will get the message. Or certainly a message. Like the Scarface line, there’s a hint of violence here, mostly due to the part about the machine gun. But don’t worry, because the great thing about a cry for help is that while you might be thought of as a threat to yourself and those around you, at least you will be thought of. And that’s a great start! Yippee ki-yay Mr Falcon indeed!
Have the time of your life by letting your family know you like dancing or something? I don’t know, it’s been years since I saw that movie. Is it the one with Kevin Bacon? No. The “She’s a Maniac” one? No? Shit. Well, whatever. Scream this line and hopefully, someone will care.
We may “live in a cynical world”, but not every cry for help is due to the weight of existence crushing your insides like an existential hydraulic press. Sometimes you’re just trapped in a never-ending, wage-slave capitalist nightmare. So let your boss know they didn’t have you at hello by screaming this beloved “Jerry Maguire” line before quitting and starting your whole self-destructive cycle over again!
Lost that loving feeling? Have you been letting “Iceman” be your wingman a bit too much? Not understanding any of these classic movie references because you do a lot of meth? Let everyone know about your addiction issues by being a real Maverick and quoting this classic “Top Gun” line.
Yeah, quoting any line from “Joker” is in and of itself a cry for help. Honestly, you can just tell people this is your favorite movie, and that might be enough.
