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!"

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KELEFA SANNEH

(Posted: Nov 19, 2002)