If you like fast, repetitive, formulaic punk rock, this album is probably for you. If you don’t typically like the aforementioned, you probably won’t like It’s Fun to Do Bad Things.

Never have I heard an album where every song sticks so closely to a recipe. Most songs start out great, but eventually devolve into repetitive shouting of the song title. “Lights On,” for example, starts with an immediately catchy verse, has a great build up, but then suddenly deflates into an anticlimactic chorus of — you guessed it — “Lights On!” shouted six times in a row.

For me, the low point of the album was when I skipped the last part of “Do You Feel It.” As the next song started, I was almost positive I had pushed the wrong button and skipped backwards. Upon further investigation, I found that both tracks sound nearly identical with the exception of
— you guessed it again — he yells a different song title in the chorus (not even kidding).

Negative criticism aside, there are good moments peppered throughout the album. The musicians are solid, the performance sounds real, and the band has a definite image. They might even be decent live act — especially if the crowd is not coherent enough to realize they are basically playing the same song over and over again. For my taste, the positive things about this album simply don’t outweigh the negative.

(Deep Elm Records, 210 N. Church Street, Suite 2502, Charlotte, NC 28202-2385)