Pennywise - All Or Nothing - Epitaph

3.5/10

Pennywise has such an extensive catalog of music, and most of it sounds the same. Until now, you knew it was always Pennywise. The band has a new vocalist since the departure of Jim Lindberg in 2009, who left the band due to creative differences. Ignite front-man Zoli Teglas is attempting to fill the shoes left behind, but apparently the band wrote and recorded "All Or Nothing" with no influence from the previous sound of the Lindberg era. It's hard to support this, because the straight-forward melodic punk the band has always played is so recognizable.

 In the 90's, Pennywise helped break punk once again to the mainstream along with a handful of their peers. Around the release of "Straight Ahead" in 1999, how the genre was presented to main stream North America was changing rapidly. Personally political and angry bands were being replaced by fart jokes and songs about girlfriends. Pennywise begun to fizzle out, but always held a solid fan base and quietly released some solid albums while little attention was paid. The band didn't ask much attention from hip kids or publications, so it ceased to exist. Still, the band deserves recognition for both their early albums and the fact that they stuck with it.

 With "All Or Nothing", we are faced with the question of, "Should Pennywise have called it quits and gone their separate ways after the departure of the figurehead for their band?" And it's a hard question to answer, because honestly, this sounds like a lot of things, but the one thing it doesn't sound like is a Pennywise record. Flechter's riffs are there, the bass lines are loose and fast, and the drums beat to a skateboard video heat, but something is different.

 The main problem: it's all over the place. The secondary problem: it's full of itself. We start off with our title track. When I first heard it I thought it was just a signature Pennywise track except with Ignite's (far inferior) vocalist. It almost sounds like a cover of an old Pennywise song by a tough-guy hardcore band. It's not awful, but it's also a huge cop-out way to get fans of other Pennywise material to sit through the entire record, such as the next track "Waste Another Day", which boasts lyrics basically ripped out of Lindberg's notebook and a drum break straight off of "About Time".

 So far, the album is completely listenable. It's angry, fast, and sounds like you can rip around on your skateboard to it. Even if it's tired, it's not awful. But it's all downhill from here with the lazily titled and lazily written "Revolution", which holds a chorus of "whoa's" and the sound of a Rise Against hit. The track is entirely far too long as Telgas asks us to "sing it again" for the hundredth time. We can only wonder if this is where the creative differences stem from, as the band sounds like they want to be all over the radio but don't really know how to get there.

"Stand Strong" is another lazy effort, with lackluster lyrics that sound as if they were written by a band of seventeen year old hardcore kids, complete with gang vocals and riffs from the Offspring's "Smash". It's all very by the book until the knock-out (in a bad way) surprise of "Let Us Hear Your Voice", an awful bastardization of pop punk that the band clearly can't come close to pulling off.

 We go through a few more tracks of clear sub-par renditions of Pennywise's back catalog until we reach "We Have It All" which tries too hard to amp up that signature sound, but in the end starts to sound like if Sum 41 sped up their most boring tracks. It is truly awful, and the theme comes together of a band that seems to be trying too hard but is actually too bloated and lazy to care.

 I've never felt like I've wasted my time listening to a studio record by Pennywise, there has always been something to take away, even if it just might have been the nostalgia of seeing them as a 13 year old kid at Van's Warped Tour. But, there's nothing left to say except that things have changed.