After an eight year absence from the music scene, "Cool To Be You" is the return release from legendary punk-popsters Descendents. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on the way that you look at it, these eight years haven't produced any seismic shifts in the music that the band makes, if anything, this is a very conservative album from the band, as ironic as the idea of a conservative punk album is.

The band more than likely feel right at home on Fat Wreck, a label noted for lots of semi-serious Californian punk bands. Like most bands on that label, Descendents create a special brand of pop punk that's laden with hooks and energy. Unlike most bands on the label though, Descendents are not imitating or copying the sound, they actually helped to develop it in the first place. Perhaps not wanting to mess with a good formula too much, the band has stuck to their roots, releasing a bunch of albums that sound more or less similar, but which do what they do very well.

As previously mentioned, "Cool To Be You" doesn't contain any radical departures or musical surprises. What it does do is serve up a half-hour of nerdy, bratty pop-punk songs that are catchier than a particularly virulent strain of ebola. That means you get songs that are about spicy food and toilets (Blast Off), punk anthems (Talking), and furious riff-rock (One More Day).

The only thing that really surprised me about this album was 'Merican, which to my knowledge is the first overtly political song that the band has ever attempted. Stylistically, it doesn't sound much different from the rest of the album, slabs of distorted guitar still dominate the track, but the lyrics are a lot more serious and profound than the other songs. Happily, the band opts not to produce a one-sided diatribe or outright ad hominem attack on certain politicians, but instead choosing to emphasise both the positive and the negative about the times that we live in. It's a pleasure to see the band tackling some more serious subject matter, and the track is executed very well.

On the whole, "Cool To Be You" isn't a must-have album, it's too similar to previous Descendents albums to really offer anything new, but it's still a decent effort. If you already own an album by these guys, then you should probably skip this, but if you've never heard these guys and want to check them out, then this isn't a bad place to start.