This digital age we live in allows for a lot of releases that maybe should have stayed in the realm of one-off tapes passed amongst friends and prospective paramours. This split release pairs one Joe McMahon of RVA transplants Smoke and Fire with Mr. Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms and adheres to the time-honored 'acoustic versions and some covers' format. It's ok, but far from anything that anyone should go out of their way to pick up. Smoke and Fire were always kinda sorta ok for me. I had seen them at least once when they were Jericho and from Boston and definitely saw them on a couple of the last Fifth Hour Hero shows, but they never really caught on for me. McMahon fares the best here, revisiting a couple tracks and doing a Johnny Cash cover. Kelly sounds like he got shit-housed and dashed off the seven tracks in the time that it took to sing them. It's that attention to detail that has kept me out of Lawrence Arms shows in recent years. There's a fine line between being shit-housed and non giving a shit and I'm finding Kelly more and more over the line. Wasted Potential, indeed. That said, I'm sure that Kelly is not losing a moment of sleep over the lack of JS-NYC advocacy and truth be told, his blog Bad Sandwich Chronicles is one of the best on the interwebs. Here's hoping he musters up an appreciable level of enthusiasm for his next release. Superfans and stalkers can get Wasted Potential here from Red Scare or as, it is a co-release with Anchorless here from them.
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