In 2002-2003, I was a sixteen-year-old emo kid who discovered all my music through scouring message boards, cross-referencing the thank yous in CD liner notes, or watching hours of Fuse TV. I was ingesting a healthy diet of Thrice, Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, pre-hiatus Weezer, Zao, and the like.

And when the Fuse airwaves started being infested with at three All-American Rejects videos on heavy rotation (was it only three? I could have sworn it was at least five), I had an almost visceral reaction. It was the cheesiest, most cliche, overproduced schlocky pop punk I had ever heard. It was so pop punk it was almost devoid of any punk ethos at all. It felt like the exact embodiment of copycats who heard Dashboard Confessional and learned the exact wrong lesson.

And for years, I endured it angrily.

But after I graduated, I was driving around with a friend and flipping through their CDs when I found this and threw it in as a joke. And to my utter surprise—and the disappointment of my punk cred—I realized that this album totally bangs.

It should be noted that I wasn’t wrong in my original assessment. This is an incredibly cheesy record. No opportunity for cliche or hokey sentimentality is left untaken. It’s not above a movie-score-ready synth string section. Many of the drum machine sections feel like defaults. The melodies are amateurish and generic. “My Paper Heart” sounds like a textbook diagram of a powerpop song. At times, it feels like parody (most particularly on “One More Sad Song“).

But I was wrong about one pretty major thing: none of that makes this a bad record. In fact, it’s exactly why it’s enjoyable. Cliches are cliche for a reason, and this sort of color-by-numbers pop music hits a very primal part of the listener’s emotions simply because it leans so heavily into trope and low-hanging-fruit. Tracks like “Swing Swing,” “Time Stands Still,” “Too Far Gone,” and “The Last Song” break right through my most cynical tendencies and speak to a poptimism free of critique or elitism. In fact, the songs that aim for a louder, more straightforward pop punk with electric guitars and acoustic drum sets might be the weakest stuff on this record.

Of course, this sort of shameless pop music only works if it’s delivered with absolute sincerity or with your tongue pressed so firmly into your cheek that it breaks a hole through it. And eighteen years after this record’s release (and fifteen years after being convinced by it), I’m not totally sure which it is. This might be parody, or it might be the work of two guys who are absolutely convinced that they are making the most profound music ever. One thing is for certain: if they’re in on the joke, they’ve certainly got me fooled.

That said, it should be mentioned that I only purchased this as a part of a buy-two-get-one deal, so my elitism still probably would have kept me from paying full price for it.