Sum of Your Achievements

Sometimes a band are an embarrassment. Sometimes a band can be a guilty pleasure. And sometimes you just have to say fuck it.

The band I'm talking about this week is Sum 41.

Sum 41 are from Canada and formed at a time when having a number in your name was cool. This trend was of course started by Blink 182.

Sum 41 now are without a doubt absolutely fucking shit. The singer has been battling alcoholism (it's unknown whether his marriage to Avril Lavigne brought about his blackout drinking binges) and clearly the band's best work was done while he was on the sauce, but there's no excuse for how dire they became. A bit like Blink 182 again in that respect. Ballads? Pianos? No thanks.

They are and always have been known as “pop-punk” which is a tag that pisses me off a little. They have generally been radio friendly and were loved by TV music channels as they notched up hit after hit in the early 2000s

Their best album, in my opinion (and that's the only opinion you're going to get on this blog), is their debut, Half Hour of Power, which was from before they made it big.

Half Hour of Power is the Ronseal of album titles. At least it would be if it wasn't only just over 26 minutes long. They were right with the power part though.

The album opens with an incredibly metal, Iron Maidenesque dual guitar harmony thing and then jumps into a riff which sounds like it was heavily borrowed from Metallica's Four Horsemen. This song is laughably called Grab the Devil by the Horns and Fuck Him up the Ass (not at all radio-friendly).

Then it goes a bit punk with Machine Gun. It's a song about drinking, so it was clearly a pre-Avril pursuit after all. There's a bit of na-na-na-ing for the purists and some reasonable axe work too.

What I Believe sounds like a sweeping up from the Blink 182 factory and then it goes bit metal again with THT which is only around 30 seconds long or a Half Minute of Power, if you will.

A couple of Blink/New Found Glory hybrids follow and then, what's that? A drum solo? It sounds like it. It's the intro to 32 Ways to Die anyway, a stop-start metallic punk thing that inexplicably becomes a Soul Limbo-sounding thing with horns in the middle.

Dave's Possessed Hair/It's What We're All About is too fast to be called pop-punk and then there's a bizarre rap thing that sounds a bit like Dog Eat Dog, but with a tongue very firmly in a cheek.

This effortlessly segues into Ride The Chariot To The Devil which is another Iron Maiden-alike, riding on horseback, tour de force of metal.

Things are brought to a close with Another Time Around, which is a singalong full of ah-ahs that has one of those long endings like a song that won't die and is more suited to live performances.

I know Sum 41 were partly influenced by metal. I once saw a concert where they said as much and proceeded to play a ropey medley of Metallica covers, but this album contains their most metal work before they became so bubblegum.

If Half Hour of Power was a haircut it would be the mullet – the perfect combintion of business and party.