Sum 41: Does This Look Infected? : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

There's no avoiding the analogy: Sum 41 are to Blink-182 as Blink-182 are to Green Day. That is: faster, slicker, more derivative. Does This Look Infected? squeezes a dozen energetic songs into a half-hour, and each one is over before you can figure out why that chorus sounds familiar or where you've heard that riff before. It used to take decades to become a punk-rock veteran, but now it takes only a few years, so post-adolescent listeners might find that this album conjures up an odd feeling of nostalgia. Doesn't anyone remember the good old days, when punk meant "All the Small Things"?

Sum 41 broke through with "Fat Lip," which achieved a neat genre hat trick: It was a pop-punk song in which they rapped about their allegiance to heavy metal. The rapping returns on the new album, and there's increased emphasis on metal, which means guitarist Dave "Brownsound" Baksh can try out more adventurous riffs. "Mr. Amsterdam" gets interesting twenty seconds in, when the pop-punk introduction makes way for a flight-of-the-bumblebee guitar line.

Many of these songs aren't as slap-happy as they first seem. But even when Deryck "Bizzy D" Whibley is singing, "Over my head/With something I said/Completely misread/I'm better off dead," the lyrics are a bit too glib to inspire sympathy. In any case, he's more convincing when he's hurling insults, which explains why the album's best song is a half-minute-long session of name-calling that ends with a different sort of analogy: He screams, "You're an asshole!"