Album Details

• Artist: All Time Low
• Album: So Wrong, It's Right
• Label: Hopeless Records
• Year of Release: 2007
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: andyfromjersey on 2007-12-10

Media

    All Time Low’s So Wrong, It’s Right makes it easy to see why the band is so popular. You have your weirdly prepubescent looking, vaguely attractive crew of twentysomethings with dyed black hair and studded belts, a front man with a ridiculously high pitched nasal voice, big fat electric guitars, and subject matter ranging from California to summer to looking at the stars… from smiles to dreams to crazy kids just living life, and anything else your ninth grade heart desires. Oh, and the colors on the cover of the CD are like, really, really bright. I feel like I’m looking at a Fruit Roll-Up advertisement, and that advertisement is working. If you’re that girl on Myspace whose URL ends in “face,” All Time Low is definitely for you.

    So Wrong, It’s Right delivers exactly what you expect from a trendy young pop punk band. With a vaguely ironist attitude (look at the art and you’ll see what I mean), All Time Low go about constructing twelve more tracks for their formulaic subgenre with surgical skill. Hopeless Records has put them in the perfect package, wrapped up and ready to go to your local junior high school.

    The only thing is, it’s pretty good. Sure, they rely on their inherent cuteness and the susceptibility of children to stuff with pretty colors (seriously, look at the album art up in the corner of the screen there). The raucous opener, “This Is How We Do,” has a mock-coy overtone of teenage sexuality with a chorus of “Boys, raise your glasses! Girls, shake those [GO! GO! GO!],” and the obligatory sort of ballad, “Remembering Sunday,” has guest female vocals by somebody named Juliet Simms in just the right place. Hell, it’s even got the mark of true [ahem] emo: a day of the week is part of a title. The rest of the tracks are your usual radio friendly rockers. These are big forgettable almost anthems that rely on the clever one-liners that are the bread and butter of pop punkers in the post Green Day world; lyrics like “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Mr. DJ,” “There’s a story at the bottom of this bottle,” and “Hips sway/and lips lie” abound in a way that’s surprisingly likeable.

    So Wrong, It’s Right  is not pretending to be anything except a poppy album by a sort of punk influenced band that a lot of younger music fans liked called All Time Low. And it may not seem like much, but it’s incredibly refreshing to see a spade finally called a spade. These guys pull off the sort of crap that such bands as Boys Like Girls and Cute is What We Aim For have desperately attempted only to graze sadly by on their way to the bottom drawer of your little sister’s dresser.

User Reviews and Comments

on 2008-04-07 ellesandra Said:

The new album seems a little too Cartel-esque for me... I prefer Put up or Shut up over So Wrong, It's Right any day.
Not Rated