The Best Damn Thing

Calling your album 'The Best Damn Thing' is setting yourself up for some serious scrutiny. And when the title track simply irritates, you’re in for a rough ride.

Any artist will be able to tell you that reinvention is a good thing. It keeps you on the edge, growing with your fans. But not when it looks like this.

Avril Lavigne had the perfect opportunity to move away from her girlish punk-rocker image to a more mature, yet in your face, rock artist who kept the same kind of edgy relevance she portrayed on her previous album.

Alas, with ‘The Best Damn Thing’, that edgy Avril is gone. Here and there she still shines through, but for the most part the Avril we knew and loved has turned into a pop princess with a lollipop in the one hand, a bag of triviality in the other, and wearing a sign around her neck saying "Don’t, like, take me serious".

Which is a pity, because amidst the punk-rocker, I-don’t-care-what-you-think attitude she used to have, there was still an undertone of credibility and relevance that forced you to take her at least relatively seriously.

Make no mistake, this album will sell (and is selling) and she’ll get a lot of new fans, but they’ll be from a different crowd: the gang that grew up with Britney Spears and is now looking for some street cred by exploring "rock" music. Except this isn’t really rock music and, frankly, Avril has lost any cred she may have had among the punk rock crowd.

Case in point: she lets rip with expletives in many a song, assumedly in an attempt to keep some semblance of her previous credibility intact — but it just becomes distasteful.

I’ve always found her 'Skater Boi' type songs to be a bit forgettable, and there’s a lot of that on this album, except that it got stuck in sticky bubblegum. The copious amount of pink to be found in the album is a dead giveaway. But even the likes of the irritating-yet-grudgingly-cool 'Girlfriend' don’t help to unglue the goo.

Then you get songs like 'Hot' where Lavigne sings about relationship bliss, which in itself could be a good thing if done right, except that the triviality of the lyrics cause the potentially substantial topic to degenerate into a wave of over-sharing.

However, here and there the Avril of 'Under My Skin' still shines through, like on the easy rocker 'Runaway' and the ballads 'When You’re Gone' and 'Innocence' — which is probably the album's standout. And you’ll appreciate it even more because, by the time you reach it, you’ll be desperate for something to quench your musical thirst.

But then it all falls flat again with 'I Don’t Have To Try'. Sung to a punk-infused tune that isn't exactly Lavigne’s best attempt, the lyrics are simply ridiculous: "I'm the one who knows the dance / I'm the one who's got the prance / I'm the one who wears the pants"

Yes, please join me in a “whatever”.

'One Of Those Girls' and ‘Contagious’ will pass with barely a flicker of life in the dead horse that the album has become, and by the time the fairly respectable final track 'Keep Holding On' rolls around, you’re left with a pain in your chest and the CD cover in your hands, contemplating whether four good songs on the album is worth not throwing it away in disgust.

We miss you Avril. Hey hey, you you.