(Single from album, "All Killer, No Filter")
This is yet another of my requested reviews and, once again, it's a cool one. I didn't realise until booting up the YouTube video to loop the song as I wrote about it (as is customary), that this band recorded this song; from the artist and title alone, I would never have reached this track...
Sum 41, I must admit, I have never heard of. However, this song, I have heard a million times. I'll keep this relatively tight, because it's a punk song, and that's what the band would want. But also because, at the end of the day, there's not a lot to this actual song, and more perhaps to the countless hangovers that have occurred in the last 12 years as a direct result of parties where this song was almost definitely played...
The opening is a crisp, muted electric guitar riff, which, production-wise, challenges the very boundaries of stereo mixing with a complex tremolo style finish on the final track, which, as an opening, rocks quite frankly. The bass launches in after this at 0:18 with the vocals transforming out of their hi-pass mastering at 0:22. By 0:35, that memorable chorus is already swinging into view, and hooking it's lengthy, aggravating chant-like edge around your brain, hoping never to let go. Which it probably won't. You will be humming, singing along to, and air-guitaring your way through your own stumbling renditions of "In Too Deep" all day after hearing it. It's catchy like that.
The guitars are also not that bad for a cheap, Canadian punk stunt like this. I say cheap, because the album, the band's debut, is (for the most part) poorly mastered, has a tacky, early 2000s overtly-US, commercially grotesque sleeve and also, basically, under the rules of 'the debut album', had very little cash thrown at it. It did well, don't get me wrong, but it was cheap, for sure. As I said however, this has had no impact on the guitars, and the epic, Blink-182-esque guitar solo at 1:52, is electrifying but also quite cosy and dumbed ('Cali-punk' style) for a guitar solo.
In fact, that said, this band are almost too similar to Blink-182. The American twinge to the vocal is recognisable in the same, attitudinal, sneering way and the drums are similarly poppy. The guitars themselves also have a very samey tone, and the bass ducks and dives around the scale of the song in a not so different way, as well. It's no big deal really, but, in all honesty, this does sound like Blink-182. In fact, if someone had played me the song, lyrically and musically, I would have said this belonged to the American punks, and not these Canadian one-hit wonders.
Anyway, that's besides the point. For an across-the-pond export out on their debut stroll in the park that is the music industry, "In Too Deep" boasted a relativley proud #13 peak in the notoriously unfair and irregular UK charts in 2001, and, on the brink of a new digital age for music, represents a particular moment on the North American pop-punk scene, as highlighted not particularly by favourites like Green Day, but by the poppy underdogs like Blink-182, Wheatus and Weezer.
★★★
Versions of “In Too Deep”
Album/Single Version - 3:27