ALLISTER - Before The Blackout

A pop-punk biography like so many others. Tim Rogner (vocals) and Johnny (guitar), Chicago, college classmates, decide to form a cover band for high school parties. After being noticed by Drive Thru, in 1998 they change their name to Allister (slang for Alasdair Gillis, a character from the classic Canadian kids' TV show, "You Can't Do That On Television") and sign a low-budget deal. So, amid a few line-up changes, come "Dead Ends And Girlfriends" (1999) and "Last Stop Suburbia" (2002), up to "Before The Blackout", their most lavishly produced album to date.

On this latest record, the echoes of post-"Dookie" Green Day run rampant, at times a hair's breadth from plagiarism ("You Lied"), at others showing how the band might have sounded without their power-pop turn ("Waiting"), but there are also surgically precise stop-chords between the fake pained vocals and the Screeching Weasel-esque minor key that then soars into a major-key chorus ("Blackout").

As for the rest, the album is a wholesale muddle of emo-core ("The Legend of Pegleg Sullivan"), telegraphed, overproduced choruses ("Rewind"), metalcore riffs drowned in the same old populist hard-rock soup ("Suffocation" and "Potential Suicide"), pitiful Adolescents-Sex Pistols impersonations ("Easy Answers"), blind rides devoid of passion (something the unsung Italian band Evolution So Far know how to detonate by the truckload), cookie-cutter dynamic shifts ("Alone") that make you long for Avril Lavigne and Sum 41.

Despite the seasoned, workmanlike technique of the producers, who - standing in for actual bandleading - barely manage to create the illusion of greater inventiveness, what's glaringly absent is even the most modest sign of artistic growth. The point is, they don't even try. Dismal.

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08/03/2006