Reel Big Fish – Everything Sucks
welcome back to the Skaject folks! today’s record brings another Skaject 1.0 back in with Reel Big Fish’s debut record, Everything Sucks!
im gonna spoil my opinion on most Reel Big Fish recorda right at the top – i think RBF are very solid trackmakers but do not put together consistent records at all. dont expect high marks on any RBF record from me. that may change on second review, but im not hopeful.
Everything Sucks, however, just kinda sucks. there’s a bit of promise here, for sure. Join the Club feels like a first draft, in that my brain tells me they reuse this horn line later and it’s not far lyrically from Don’t Start a Band.
but honestly, the rest of the record is rough in ways that are difficult to enjoy, between bad mixing or low quality recording, edgy humor that doesnt land at all for me, and being VERY packed at 21 tracks. even the songs here that would be rerecorded later that i like the other versions of, are in a very rough form here – parts of them are charming, but its a far cry from the cleaned up version of the tracks they feature later. i tend to be fairly charitable to young bands on their first outings – sometimes folks write shitty songs, lyrically thematically or instrumentally, but theres a kind of earnestness in debut records that wins me over. i can feel a bit of that here, and theyve got a strong instrumental core, but not enough to offset the misses – songs like Hate You and Why Do All Girls Think They’re Fat miss the comedic mark and land solidly in incel territory, tbh.
even in a discography where my current recommendation is to cherry pick tracks, this record is a pretty hard skip.
faves – Join the Club
dislikes – Jig
Everything Sucks – 2/10
next week, the Skaject record will be The Pietaster’s Oolooloo!
previous: The Beacon Street Collection | next: Oolooloo
this is the first Reel Big Fish release | next: Turn the Radio Off
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