You cannot judge a book by its cover. However, give it a couple of pages and you can begin forming a reasonable first impression. First impressions are of course, proverbially, very important. For example, Anthony Burgess, of Clockwork Orange fame, once opened a book with: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite (rent-boy) when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me”. Now that is an opening. You sit up, you take notice and you are instantly interested in what follows.

Teen orientated power-poppers All-American Rejects have probably never pondered the importance of first impressions. If they had, they possibly would have reconsidered opening their album ‘When the World Comes Down’ with a chorus of “I wanna I wanna I wanna touch you/You wanna touch me too”. It is unapologetically monotonous emo-pop. The album’s redemption is that from the quagmire of passé teenage poetry and unremarkable three-cord bubblegum-punk riffs, a handful of decent guitar pop songs emerge. But even they take a little longer to warm to than they should, especially given what has preceded them.

‘Fallin’ Apart’ is a slow-burning ballad, with a catchy chorus and touches of violin sponged from Dexys Midnight Runners’ ‘Come On Eileen’. The darkest offering, ‘Real World’, is aided by swirling atmospheric effects and distortion – even possessing something of an emotive oomph. And the first single to be released from the album, ‘Give You Hell’, is an infectiously boisterous break-up song with a shout-a-long outro. But then practically every song on the album tries to achieve this, they just fall terribly short. Since there is a limited period that anyone will allow even their closest friends to indulgently pine, listening to an album of almost entirely relationship breakdown songs just isn’t much fun. ‘When the World Comes Down’ could have made a couple of very passable EPs, but instead it’s a lacklustre album with more filler than your average all-American apple pie.

3/10

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