IF ska had never existed... If Green Day had never produced the Dookie album... If these things had never happened, then Less Than Jake would be a startling sit-up-and-beg band.

As it is, you can trace the band's ancestry directly from this so-so parentage. With Dookie producer Rob Cavallo behind the desk, this is a by-the-numbers skate park rock album, with only a couple of tracks standing out from the pell-mell, must-get-through-this-song-soon dash of the rest. Strangely, neither of these was the debut single - the very average She's Gonna Break Soon. Instead, the delights of The Science Of Selling Yourself Short or That's Why They Call It A Union await album buyers.

Updated: 10:31 Thursday, July 10, 2003