Sum 41
Half Hour of Power

It is unnecessary to assert that if you are looking for even a slight glimmer of novelty here, you can simply close the page and move on. It's not surprising, in fact, that no one had yet touched upon this disc, which turns out to be the least successful among those released so far by the Canadians.

Assuming that you need to like the genre and have an open mind, "Half Hour Of Power" remains nonetheless a mediocre and passable work. And mediocre not compared to elite productions or those from another era or more "serious" genres, but even when placed in its own category, it remains really at low levels.

Considering that the same year an album like "Pennybridge Pioneers" was released, giving a nice lesson on how melodic punk could be played in 2000 by many small bands, without commercial center signs, and the following year saw the light of a work like "From Here To Infirmary" (Matt Skiba docet) which interpreted "college rock" in almost dark tones, anything but predictable.

Here instead, we border on an almost total lack of personality, a debut that follows, rightly so, those voices that label Sum 41 as continuers of the "American Pie" saga and subsequent chapters of Blink-182. Not surprisingly, more than a few choruses have peeked into various episodes narrating the hot misadventures of American college life.

An "Enema Of The State pt.2" cloying and citationist at 360°: here's the perfect summary of the internal guts of this organization chart. With the only exception being that Deryck Whibley's voice here is less irritating than that of his colleague/friend of feasts/cult-movie consumer of Jenna Jameson, Tom Delonge.

It is even difficult to frame and judge a CD with only eleven tracks, seven actual and four consisting only of negligible instrumental interludes and similar frivolities. So much so that there is still debate over whether this should indeed be considered a real full-length or just an EP, given the limited running time.

What to save? Something, like the summer anthem "Summer" (later re-inserted on the subsequent "All Killer No Filler"), fitting for the season, which boasts a riff that, once memorized, sticks in your head, with a catchy rhythm and the other anthem full of carefree and sunny notes of "What I Believe". Worth mentioning is "Another Time Around" which ends with a series of successive and continuous rolling drum beats that close the piece.

On "Dave's Possessed Hair/ What We're All About", as the title suggests, a small snippet from the track part of the Spiderman OST is introduced.

The moniker of the CD refers to the total duration of the album, which is half an hour, considering also the minutes of silence present in the last track.

The uniformity of the proposed episodes does not improve the overall quality at all, while the guitarwork is elementary and fitting the standards of other bands. In comparison, it makes the fourth album stand out distinctly.

Fortunate for us and for them, in the future, read "Does This Look Infected?" and "Chuck" then, they will mature quite a bit, transforming and changing the skin that envelops them, showing encouraging signs.

But returning to the present (2000), here the ship of the four sinks and takes on water from all sides.

Redundant and plasticky, merely dispensable.