In middle school I had a best friend, I'll call her Veronica. We were two parallel yet distinct flavors of edgy, and we were for a time inseparable (and I am pretty confident no one I met from school ever understood me more than she did) but we were also still middle school girls at our emotional nadir. And eventually this would cause a rift between us until we stopped speaking to each other in 8th grade and never spoke again since. What actually happened is that she stopped talking to me, just as the rest of our friend group started to wane from me around the same time (I'm sure because of something I did, I was a real asshole to be around at that age.) And not wanting to accept the reality of being rejected again, because around that tender time the only family that was regularly around was my single mom who was always at work and wasn't really able to be around outside of that, I wrote Veronica a long letter of why I didn't want to be friends with her anymore even though she clearly made the decision first. Anyway. Her favorite bands were Green Day and Linkin Park. I was obsessed with Björk and Radiohead. We both thought we were tortured souls that no one understood and wanted for someone else to notice how tortured we were. She wore fingerless gloves and wore her hair over her eyes and I dressed normal but I would cut my hair short, or would face my iPod conspicuously when a younger and more hip-looking substitute teacher would be in proximity in the hopes I could talk to them about Elliott Smith and they could tell me I had very good music taste for my age. The reason why I tell this story is so you can understand why I gave this record a 1. It's not because it's bad or too edgy or juvenile, it's because when I was 12, it was very important to me that the world understood that I wasn't *this* kind of edgy, I was a *very specific and different* kind of edgy, so god please, somebody notice. Just like it was for Veronica.