CHICAGO — Shane Patterson, financial manager at Sunset Holdings and self-professed “elder emo”, spent the last two weeks of company time desperately trying to code the new Fall Out Boy single “Love From The Other Side” into his Microsoft Teams homepage, according to multiple frustrated sources.
“I did this all the time in my parents’ computer room back in high school. Just have to get the .html right. I honestly can’t believe our multi-million dollar company, with wealthy shareholders across the globe, supports software this archaic,” Patterson whispered into his seventh cup of black coffee. “Not only am I unable to embed this song, which, is giving off the best ‘Folie a Deux’ meets ‘Take This To Your Grave’ vibes, but I can’t even code in a little dog pushing a ball across the screen with his nose, either. This is like 1999 all over again.”
Sunset Holdings IT specialist Jenna Fitzgerald admitted that she was at the end of her rope due to Patterson’s flood of support tickets.
“It’s not even about the sheer volume of help requests he’s submitted, it’s how he’s writing them,” Fitzgerald explained. “I’m like, having to decipher the saddest slam poetry, all over a request for editor access. Don’t even get me started on how he’s signing the support tickets – what the hell is a car crash heart, anyway? And look, I’m Gen Z, I don’t judge anyone over how they identify or who they love, but the cheap box dye he just started using has stained the headrests of five different office chairs. Between him and Martha in Human Resources who keeps requesting I convert an MP3 into a PDF for her, I’m about to lose it”.
Tom from MySpace shared how stoked he is to see personalized coding find its way into the American workplace.
“When I started a little company you may have heard of, my only goal was for its users to bond over radical self-expression. With customized headers ranging from dancing avocados all the way to dancing hamsters, to musical selections and hilarious glitter .gifs, we enabled our users to stylize their content however they wanted, so long as these nerds didn’t need our help doing it,” said the Myspace founder. “It only makes sense that our new generation of workers want to incorporate this into the productivity platforms they use the most. Perhaps the CEO of Sunset Holdings should take note of this, and then become an employee favorite and land in everyone’s Teams Top 8.”
At press time, Patterson was petitioning the principles of Sunset Holdings to migrate the company’s entire network infrastructure to a more malleable digital workspace prior to the next Fall Out Boy single drop.
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Let’s just get this out of the way: this is a bad record. Coming about at the height of Matt Skiba’s steampunk vest phase, “Agony & Irony” sounds like less of an experiment from an evolving punk band and more like a coded cry for help from the krautrock muppet they kidnapped to write it for them.
There really isn’t much to be said about the tenacious blandness of this album other than it does finally prove you can hit a point of diminishing returns on the whole spooky pun schtick. Like, these guys have always had some pretty goofy album titles, but this one, much like the album itself, feels like the fatigued barrel-scraping of a band who were just ready to bail out of the studio and go get some jalapeno poppers at Applebees.
After years of piss-poor piddling about, and maybe three or fourteen too many side projects, the band came together in 2018 to make what turned out to be a moderately decent record. And while nothing on “Is This Thing Cursed?” is necessarily gonna blow your dick off the way Alkaline Trio songs used to, before you knew how disappointing actual sex really is, a couple of tracks might just tickle you under your taint and make you appreciate the shoulder shrug handjobs you’ve come to accept from life.
“Maybe I’ll Catch Fire” as a whole is about on par with lackluster later offerings from the band, with the exception of album closer “Radio,” which has gone on to inspire two generations of overly-depressed tenth graders who are already convinced they will never find love.
There is an old axiom that goes “you either die the hero or you live long enough to unironically wear a frilly Dracula shirt on stage like it’s just fucking cool or something.” This album represents the band diving headlong into the latter.
A lot of people are probably gonna scoff at this one, and we really don’t give a shit. If you don’t like it then go write your own list. This one is ours and “This Addiction” is number 4. Go fuck yourselves.
Before the band delved full-on into frilly Dracula shirt burnout, they dipped their toes into the serial killer end of the songwriting pool and penned “Good Mourning” – penned with a feather tip quill and a well full of blood from all three band members, at least one engineer who worked on the album, and a random intern who just happened to be in the wrong studio at the wrong equinox.
This album is almost perfect – and if you’re reading this then you already knew that. So let’s just call it like it is and all admit to ourselves that “Enjoy Your Day” is the whiniest goddamn song we’ve ever heard. We have to believe that at some point the rest of the band sat Dan Andriano down to bluntly tell him “you know you’re fucking up this record, right?” Andriano continues to refuse to comment.
For some Alkaline Trio fans, “From Here To Infirmary” is the point where the band began turning away from their punk rock roots. However, any Alkaline Trio fan with a brain and a competent sexual track record will note the album as the perfect blend of dark punk ethos and pop showmanship. Though little is known of the behind-the-scenes goings-on during the recording, scattered sources have suggested that the album is the result of chaos magic combined with a deal the band signed at the crossroads. This would explain why drummer Mike Felumlee was sucked into a hell portal at Warped Tour shortly after recording was completed.
