Confession time; I got a little nerd-on for the last Simple Plan album, the self-titled release from 2008 that saw the Canadian pop punks seemingly grow up and spread their wings. Sure, the album was slick, Pro Tooled to fuckery and more ridiculously over-produced than the Def Leppard back catalogue but, with songs like 'Your Love Is A Lie', the band seemed to have transcended the genre that had spawned them, albeit with a record so sugary and bad for you listening to it was like sucking off the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. But it was my dirty little secret...

'Get Your Heart On!', their fourth studio album, arrived at my cultured ear full of promise. Then opening track 'You Suck At Love' came grinning out of the speakers and all the good work of the last album disappeared suddenly like a dream of the perfect woman. Granted, the song is shiny and new and.....exactly the same as every other pop punk song on the planet. How long can you bounce for without getting tired?

Second song 'Can't Keep My Hands Off You' offers promise. Featuring Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, this song is punchy and possibly the album's bright spot, slugging it out - yeah, right - bitch slapping it out with 'Jet Lag', a pure soft rock track that features British pop singer Natasha Bedingfield, for the honour. And those guest appearances, more important than oxygen to the modern record label, keep on coming; 'Freaking Me Out' features All Time Low frontman Alex Gaskarth, though you wouldn't know it as all these fuckers sound the same, and is another generic piece of genre fodder housed around a dodgy roller disco electro hook. 'Summer Paradise', a helium-lite seasonal ode to insipid songsmithery, follows featuring something called a K'naan. Now this may sound like a particularly stupid Star Trek villain but, as my one-stop research-shop informs me, it is a Somali-Canadian rapper. Because every rock album needs that one song with the rap dude, right?

That's the thing though, this album, whatever tag is pinned to it, whatever genre the PR decides to push it as to the impressionable young husks of meat with ears - barely - who will adopt this as a soundtrack to their soulless summers, is as rock, as punk, as a puff of angel's breath. It makes Avril Lavigne sound like Wendy O. Williams. It contains a song, 'Loser Of The Year', that, surely, would be the name of a clichéd pop punk song parodied on a comedy show for shits and giggles. The merest hint of the F-word on this album is met with a cheeky backing vocal that ensures that this watered down cheese is available to be bought by tweens in small town-murdering supermarkets and malls de merde. How very punk rock, chaps.

There are a few faint moments of clarity, 'Last One Standing' for example, but when the album (available as an iTunes exclusive with three bonus tracks if you're one of those fuckers who don't, like, have room for CDs anymore) closes with 'This Song Saved My Life', a song that would only save your life if you were suffering from hypoglycemia and needed an injection of fluid so sugary that your teeth would rot just trying to say it. I looked for a disease where cheese was needed as part of the revival process. Couldn't find one.

Cheese. Imagine a group of pop punkers hanging on the street corner, freshly ironed Hot Topic apparel gifting the breeze the DNA of the seven year old Asian worker who made the fucking rag, seeing an REO Speedwagon type, poodle perm cascading onto his shoulder pads like a sea of intoxicating awesomeness. What do you think they would say to the legend? They'd slaughter him without even realising that their favoured genre is the modern version of the dude's cheesy arena rock of days long gone. But with worse songs. Way worse songs. 'Keep On Loving You' - now that's a tune. Remember it.

www.myspace.com/simpleplan