Review Summary: dear darkness, I guess the point is I'll be moving on
It's somehow been six damn years since
Party Adjacent, one of the most criminally overlooked pop-punk joints of last decade. Operating from a radical idea of 'what if the genre's best songwriter had an interesting guitar backing for the first time?', that album's pairing of Dan Andriano with Mike Huguenor (burning up the fretboard), Kevin Higuchi (drums) and one Jeff Rosenstock (wizard behind the boards) was a borderline godsend that went unjustly unnoticed. The best case scenario would be that
Dear Darkness, a new album from a new Andriano project with more or less the same sound, shines a favourable light back on its predecessor. That doesn't make this a bad release, just a solid one with less innovation away from Andriano's default sound that the earlier album flaunted with the delicate "Don't Have a Thing" or noise rock banger "Snake Bites". Even when
Dear Darkness throws in a few upsets, in "Wrong"'s piano buildup or the relaxed country sprawl of "Into Your Dream (The Sophie Moon)", there's the nagging sense that Dan Andriano is under-delivering on what we know he's capable of.
That being, for the uninitiated, some of the best pop-punk of the last two decades. Even though his songs with Alkaline Trio are minor in terms of appearances per album, Andriano's hallmark strengths consistently mark him out as the superior songwriter, if not the backbone holding the band together through otherwise varied output quality. All that good shit is still right here: his jackhammer voice, limited in range but packing as much of an emotional wallop as ever. The tendency towards subtly entrancing melodies which slowly engage your brain instead of crowbarring their way in with sugary sweetness. Those goddamn lyrics, still like a door opened on a life we have no business knowing about but are warmly welcomed to anyway. Andriano's style, so castigating when it's negative and so heartwarming when not, has rarely faltered or hit a rough patch: the emotional honesty which gave us "Every Thug Needs a Lady", an easy contender for anybody's pop-punk Mount Rushmore, is still here – a little bit battered and bruised with the years, but fuller and richer with the accompanying experience.
So what's missing? I'd hesitate to say that Andriano's music needs the relationship with Matt Skiba's songs to really come alive, although 2018's
Is This Thing Cursed? reminded us for the first time in more than a decade how fruitful that yin-yang can be at its best. It might be more accurate to say he needs a strong collaborative voice in any form, whether that's the push-pull between his songs and a co-writer's, or just the guiding hand of Rosenstock's production keeping
Party Adjacent creative and light on its feet. Andriano can be incredible on his own, as 2011's
Hurricane Season aptly demonstrates, but the self-produced
Dear Darkness may be proof that his brand of pop-punk needs the occasional shake and rattle to reach the heights he's capable of. This album does brush by those occasionally: early highlight "Dear Darkness" feels like a watershed moment for the songwriter, rejecting the depression that's clouded his thoughts for so long while cynically acknowledging the likelihood of it coming back around every now and then. "The Excess" and "It's a Trap Door!" let guitarist Randy Moore off the leash a little bit, adding some bite to two of the album's catchiest songs. But the clear highlight is "The Rest of You", a furious guitar rager with a chorus so colossal that it feels like a prog-rock epic without even reaching four minutes, an emotional capstone to the album that ranks among Andriano's best in years.
Dear Darkness is worth the ride for these songs, if not just for that familiar feeling of comfort and warmth that accompanies Dan Andriano's words and voice even at their darkest for a longtime fan. There's a reason that even his average songs tend to have a leg up on many of his contemporaries' best; whether he's screaming along with Tim McIlrath on a two-minute punk banger or giving you some hard-earned life advice over acoustic guitar, there's no doubt that Andriano is always writing from the heart, wrenching and ripping the music out from the corners of his bloodstream.
Dear Darkness is a pretty average album from the man, and it's still great - you don't really need any more introduction than that.
