Reggie and the Full Effect, Midtown, A Static Lullaby and Motion City Soundtrack

With the Warped Tour sadly come and gone for another year and Dashboard Confessional's next trip to town still a couple of months away, what's a misunderstood emo-rocker to do for support this week? Easy: Head to the Ridglea Theater on Friday night for a four-band lineup that should soothe any outstanding angst you've got hanging around. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it's a case of quantity over quality. Headliners Reggie and the Full Effect ought to be the way-better version of sister band the Get Up Kids, since the outfit adds jokes, more keyboards and dumber choruses to the Kids' formula, while doing away with all the lame emoting and slow R.E.M. strumming that ruined last year's On a Wire, the Kids' big grab at indie-rock success; in reality, Reggie's third disc, Under the Tray, is a painfully unfunny parody of the same that's more smug than this preview. A Static Lullaby is good at coming up with song titles that evoke the pretty/ugly friction in its music--"Lip Gloss and Letdown," "The Shooting Star That Destroyed Us" and "A Sip of Wine Chased With Cyanide" all feature on the humdrum ...And Don't Forget to Breathe--but that's more of an English-class trick than the basis of a band. Motion City Soundtrack shows promise on I Am the Movie, its new Epitaph CD, though I can't think of a reason why you'd listen to it and not the All-American Rejects' far more satisfying (and far less conflicted) DreamWorks one. As for Midtown, wasn't that annoying peroxide-headed emo girl from The Real World a few seasons back way into them? Sorry, dudes, that one's gonna stick around a while.