Tom DeLonge is a man who, despite changing fashions, has more or less stuck to doing what he wants to do. His most wellknown project, Blink 182 was hot stuff at my high school when I was in about Grade 9, until "Enema of the State" was released to a couple of awkward chuckles, and suddenly it was cool to hate them. Scorn was poured upon Tom for being a one-trick mallpunk band, and the cool kids got into slightly more sophisticated bands like The Living End.

DeLonge kept at it though, pumping out another couple of albums until it was simply untenable for a man entering his late twenties to continue singing songs about high school rebellion. A couple of new projects followed, culminating in Angels & Airwaves, which although it's still firmly in the "pop-punk" genre, is about as far as you can possibly get from bratty punk songs that revolve around lots of penis jokes.

A lot of the change revolves around the extensive use of various echo and reverb effects on the guitars, which has caused some to compare the sound of this band to The Cure and U2. It's a slightly misleading comparison, "I-Empire" has none of the epic soundscapes of former, and little of the spare, subtle pop of the latter, but there are elements of both buried deep in the mix. More noticeable is the influence from more melodic emo bands like Evaline, as well as veteran post-grunge acts like Live and Our Lady Peace.

Opening track Call To Arms, displays this combination of influences quite well. A lengthy intro featuring some echoing, distant guitar sets the mood, before a sparse, single-note guitar riff that The Edge would be proud of enters the song. Just when you think the whole track is going to burst into U2 territory though, the vocals start and the guitar work becomes a lot more immediate, shifting abruptly into emo rock territory. Everything's Magic on the other hand goes for a lot more of a traditional pop-punk flavour, with a driving beat and a bouncing bass line that gives the album a bit of much-needed musical variety.

Granted, anything that DeLonge sings is going to sound like an emo song, partly because of associations that listeners will almost certainly have with Blink 182, but also because his vocal style is, well, just a little bit whiny. This is offset by the fact that he's actually rather good when it comes to writing shamelessly catchy pop songs. In fact, compared to Angels & Airwaves' debut album, DeLonge lets himself write that sort of pop-punk song, with the emphasis on pop, a lot more, resulting in song writing that sounds a lot more natural and a lot less forced.

While there's nothing here that transcends the genre and really blows you away, it's still a pretty good slab of intelligent pop-punk. DeLonge's songwriting has really improved in leaps and bounds since 1997, and this is the sort of album that you won't have to be ashamed of listening to, even if you have completed high school.