I picked this album up mostly because it was released through Adeline, which I thought had actually stopped being a record label. Seeing as Adeline has a track record which includes One Man Army, Pinhead Gunpowder, and The Living End, I was willing to buy into the press sheet’s claim of this being some essential pop punk. Well, in summation, this album is a whole lotta pop and very little punk. This is, basically, a mall-core album that Hot Topic can probably push on pre-pubescent girls, but for anyone else it just ain’t that good. This is in the same league as later day Blink-182 and Ataris’ albums, after the bands had any semblance of attitude or edginess drained from them. In all fairness to early Blink and Ataris, maybe this fits more in the Fall Out Boy/Good Charlotte category of bands who started out completely sanitized for mass consumption from the very beginning. Actually, considering that Billie Joe or Adrienne Armstrong aren’t even included in the myriad thanks, I wonder if maybe Adeline at this point is just another “independent” incubator label that majors use to build “cred” for bands before they have their official major label debuts. Blechh.
–Adrian (Adeline)