Sum 41's "CHUCK" was one of those albums that I got too early in my life to actually understand - I was still learning and discovering new stuff, and when I got this CD I remember I was disappointed - expecting a pop skate punk album to blast while skating, I instead got an album for quiet reflection while waiting for the train bringing me back home from the town where I was attending high school.
I was kinda disappointed and honestly the CD kinda got forgotten - at the time I preferred Screeching Weasel, NOFX, Satanic Surfers, Rancid, Exploited and Casualties - stuff that felt like it had more edge, and I was at the same time discovering all about Italian punk hardcore - I was 14 and this whole huge amount of new stuff was a lot to process for a kid coming from a small town.
Then, years later, I found myself listening to this again and again until today I consider it a key album to my musical taste and an awesome album overall.
The album's title is named after a volunteer UN Peacekeeper named Chuck Pelletier who was in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Sum 41 was filming a documentary. Fighting broke out during production, and Pelletier helped the band evacuate their hotel during the shooting and fighting, as he was staying at the same hotel.
Many tracks were way too mellow for me, but a couple of them stuck in my brain forever. Not as adolescent anthems like Fat Lip from their previous album, but as something more honest and less performative.
I am not googling while writing this as I want it to be as honest and direct and personal as possible, but I can tell you that I can still remember every riff of The Bitter End, which is basically almost a thrash metal track and which I can still poorly play — a track that, even with one of the worst and most cringe videos in history, is still a bomb of honesty and vulnerability that 14-year-old me was clearly not ready to hear.
