Fastball

All the Pain Money Can Buy

Fastball offers up dark pop in a vein similar to the Wallflowers. Pain is appealing right from track one, "The Way," a song about taking "an exit to eternal summer slacking." Fastball's three members (Tony Scalzo, Miles Zuniga and Joey Shuffield) have a gift for writing painful and serious songs that still manage to be fun to listen to. The dangerous sentiment on the bitter "Slow Drag" penetrates deeply when Zuniga sings, "I wanna see you dead / lying in the muddy ground / You're nothing to me," then segues into the peppy "G.O.D. (Good Old Days)" with perky trumpets, saxophones and a trombone.