With pop punk wheezing its way through its most watered-down, mainstream-friendly phase ever, it's pretty clear to everyone: We need something new to take its place. Bands need a scene to which they can attach themselves, fans need a new home once the pop-punk world finally crumbles back into dust -- or, more likely, the underground where it belongs -- and our ears need something in which we can believe. We need something, anything, to save a generation of young rockers from ignominy.

Classic Case's sophomore effort, Losing at Life illustrates this point perfectly. Although the band's love of big guitars lends itself to the sort of stomp-box tones and power-chord melodies that flitted around the pop-punk, mall-punk and pop-punk worlds for several years, Losing at Life isn't able to fit into that idiom too well. Classic Case is a little too comfortable in the studio and too wary of the genre's baggage completely to embrace the pop-punk underground. The only trouble is, it doesn't seem to know where it should turn now.

That leaves Classic Case grasping at ways to make Losing at Life stick together without pop-punk glue that's traditionally been the fallback for guitar-worshipping young men. Most of the time, it relies on ill-defined post nu-metal hard rock formulas to do the trick, whether it's with a slow-burning number that's one part torch ballad melody and one part big-balls riffery ("Devil's Advocate") or jumping between shimmering post-emo guitars and a sizzling guitar accompanied by a pummeling kick-drum beat ("Into a Nightmare"). That's probably to be expected, with Helmet nu-metal granddaddy Page Hamilton twisting knobs for this effort. Glimmers of glam-rock glitter occasionally swirl around ("Unsteady"), and dark, spacious stretches prove someone's been paying attention to AFI's faux-goth atmospheres ("Vampires"), but neither extreme's enough to add anything but accents and highlights to the outfit's riff rock.

It's hard to lay the blame for Losing at Life's unfocused direction entirely upon Classic Case. Like many of its contemporaries, he five-piece is making the first steps to leave the cliches of pop punk behind it forever. It's just left without a direction to go, a reason to exist or, if you like, a bandwagon to jump. Classic Case shows that we're more than ready to let pop punk finally wither away -- just as soon as we cultivate something to replace it.