If you're looking for catchy songs, artistic refinement or experimentation, you're on the wrong way. Expressing the fifth product of this Estacawpa-based band out of the canon of the American teen drama would be improper (e.g. their songs have often been used as soundtrack for this movie genre). This is just a 3 Doors Down album, nothing more.

“Time Of My Life” opens up with the homonymous song and seems to entail an evolution in the band’s style. Actually it remains an unicum in antinomy with its titletrack nature, a vain endeavour to follow the newest trends (see Kasabian overall). From “When You’re Young” on we get back to the typical teen ballad style that filled the band's four previous works. The switch from those ones to more rhythmic songs, though lacking the incisiveness of a mature rock sound, drains fluency from the listening. The blank voice does not facilitate the vividness and so does the soil sung of each chorus. “When You’re Young” is also the first single from this album and it confirms that 3 Doors Down are not meant to grow away from the melodies and themes that has been resounding in a bunch of young Americans' rooms (and not only) in the last fifteen years.

“Heaven” shouts out the loneliness and that "world incomprehension" sensation, “Race For The Sun” the willingness to never give up and “Believer” closes the album with an eye on a man's first sentimental affairs. Nothing better than a catalogue of a teenage's inner upheavals. The influence of their roots in the land of blues only comes out in “Back To Me”, where the chords of Kansas’ “Dust In The Wind” echoes. Their origins and the Mississippi sound should be the leitmotiv of this album, however they hang tough about the distance feeling. They are still too much linked to the age when they lived it, as the new single “Every Time You Go” confesses. Compared to other teen band such as The Calling or Nickelback, 3 Doors Down does not succeed to trace their own artistic path, but it seems that the fans paved it for them.

It lacks the bound in quality, the maturity of themes and topics we should necessarily expect from a band with fifteen years of career, which proved to be durable, never went through a single line-up change and had more than 300 live performance in a year. "Time Of My Life" is a “teen advisory explicit content” product and it has to be listened with light-heartedness, as when you're young and you're looking for words to convey the unknown vibes stuck on your own immature soul.