Good Charlotte: The Chronicles Of Life And Death ("Life" Version) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Punk pop isn't brain surgery, but there's an art to it. Good Charlotte's awareness of that fact has resulted in a string of hit singles and some of the genre's most memorable tunes of the past few years. Three albums into their career, they falter by attempting to stray from the formula they've mastered. It seems they had too big a recording budget at their disposal: Though straight-ahead rockers such as "S.O.S." and "Walk Away (Maybe)" pack greater emotional wallop than Good Charlotte's previous bubblegum punk, the Madden twins and Co. junk up several songs with unnecessary flourishes such as the string parts on "Predictable" or the New Order-ish synths on "Ghost of You." Somewhere underneath all the slick production, a handful of truly great gut-punch melodies fight their way to the surface. It's a shame that Good Charlotte have made it so easy to ignore those hooks and focus on questions such as "Did they really need to open the record with a two-minute choral number that sounds like it came from the score to Edward Scissorhands?"

All of which compounds the usual problem Good Charlotte face: asinine lyrics. The band that wrote the unforgivably dumb line "Girls don't like boys/Girls like cars and money" has outdone even its worst with the painful "I Just Wanna Live" -- an agonizing attempt at rap rock. Sample rhyme: "Talkin' on the phone/Got an interview with the Rolling Stone/They're sayin', 'Now you're rich and now you're famous/Fake-ass girls all know your name.' " Hey, guys, leave us out of it.