Sum 41

There’s something strangely tragicomic about Sum 41’s increasingly desperate attempts to hitch a ride on whichever bandwagon happens to be passing through town at the time. Over the course of their previous three albums the Canadians have dropped their baggy trousers for pop-punk, glam-rock, rap-rock, nu-metal, old metal and just about anything else that might shift them an extra few copies. On ‘Underclass Hero’ they’ve gone straight for the commercial mother lode, pitching their sound almost equidistantly between ‘The Black Parade’ and ‘American Idiot’ (insert your own ‘parade of idiots’ gag here). That they hit the bullseye more often than not is ultimately besides the point: if you already own those albums, why waste your time with this?

Dan Silver

4 out of 10