I believe Shakespeare put it best: "O irony, sweet irony, how tender is thy touch." That's from an unreleased early draft of "Hamlet" from before all the melancholy stuff was added. It's a draft that clearly wasn't available at the school library when John and Ray Carbola, the brothers behind Romance For Greedheads, were growing up.

It shouldn't come as much surprise; John's main gig is as singer/songwriter/groupie-catcher for the too-sad emo assemblage, the Just Friends. Guitarist Ray, formerly of Probably My Final Thought, came out of retirement (read: part-time computer repair work) to work with his brother and brought tasteless keyboardist Jesse Resch along. Their drummer is perhaps the group's most formidable member -- it's an Alesis SR-16 drum machine.

Together these guys are responsible for some of the absolute bottom of the barrel that emo has had to offer in the past few years, particularly John, whose Just Friends actually had the balls to record and release a song called "Crying in My Sweater (Because I Lost My Nerve)." Moreover, the Just Friends' late-model work has been so drowned in studio sheen that one has to wonder why a sheeny side-project was even necessary. (Which doesn't get to the question of this record's necessity in general, but I digress.)

A statement on the Vagrant website says that the Carbolas wanted to do a record that would "show the world the genius of Bryan Adams" and, well, this is certainly a record that tries to show the world something about Bryan Adams. The album's opener, simply titled "Love," is as sugary and radio-friendly a ballad as you're likely to have ever heard... until you get to track two, "(Asking) The Wrong Questions." "Questions," the first single, rivals "My Heart Will Go On" with its soaring synthetic strings and obvious lyrics: "I'm asking the wrong questions/because your answers are too hard to take." It's a song I wouldn't be surprised to see Adams cover if he were still alive. It's just begging -- BEGGING! -- to be the theme to a terrible movie in which Kevin Costner plays a reporter/detective that falls in love with a crucial witness. Hearing it makes me want to outlaw music, just to be sure I never hear it again.

But then it gets worse.

"Penguin Brothers" is about how great it is to have your brother as your best man when you marry the greatest girl in the world. "Introductions" is the most PG-13 song ever written about a couple getting down for the first time. The title track references enough "Bambi" characters that Disney's surely getting a piece of the back end. "Everything You Are" does nothing more than list off all her great qualities. In "The Last Look in Your Eyes," it's better for her if he goes. In "Breath," he'll love her and provide for her until his last y'know.

I wish I were kidding.

If you somehow manage to listen to this record to the end, congratulations, but don't take off your safety gear just yet. There's a hidden track and somehow you just knew it had to be a cover of "Keep on Loving You." That's right, that's the one they had to keep hidden. Incredibly, they manage to offend the spirit of even this tepid dial-turner, going so far overboard that I'm sure Kevin Cronin's career is spinning in its grave.

I don't know if I can call this the undisputed worst record of the year -- Tom DeLonge's unfortunate diversion into bluegrass makes the decision a difficult one -- but it's near as damn it. The sad thing is, the Just Friends' debut, Yr Pain Is Funny, showed signs of reconciling some of emo's more childish tendencies with adult rock. What I didn't quite expect was that Carbola would reconcile emo's childish tendencies with adult contemporary's childish tendencies.

-Alex Lipman, September, 2004