All that good shit is still right here: his jackhammer voice, limited in range but packing as much of an emotional wallop as ever. 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. That being, for the uninitiated, some of the best pop-punk of the last two decades. 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 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'. 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. 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.

It's somehow been six damn years since Party Adjacent, one of the most criminally overlooked pop-punk joints of last decade. Review Summary: dear darkness, I guess the point is I'll be moving on

The fruitful darkness album