Mad Season

On "Mad Season" the band serves up another slick collection of R.E.M. and Pearl Jam-influenced post-grunge classic rock tailor-made for ubiquitous radio play.

Each song isn't particularly interesting or life-changing, but, damn, if every one of them doesn't boast a hook that sticks in your head until you're humming "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" just to exorcise it. For better or worse, this is talented songwriting...

Matchbox Twenty never claimed to be original or challenging or anything more than a lightweight and entertaining pop band. Which is why Mad Season, with its rather casual and jammy feel, is so surprising, so substantial, and much more satisfying than expected.

The band's edge has dulled considerably, in spite of guitarists Kyle Cook and Adam Gaynor's best efforts on "Angry" and "Mad Season," but for the most part they're heavily sedated throughout, as are bassist Brian Yale and drummer Paul Doucette, begging the question: Where's the band?

What lots of people loved about "Push" isn't much in evidence here, but neither is what lots of people hated about it.

A relatively bloodless album, a work that seems formatted to satisfy the demands of the marketplace without really transcending them.

The follow-up is an equally passionate, turbulent affair, sounding, oddly, like a cross between Foreigner and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Especially in its ballad-heavy second half, mad season feels like the rock equivalent of a chick flick.

Every song on Mad Season is a production mini-epic.... Under the haywire production are crafty songs.... But when the crescendos surge and the keyboards chime, he starts to sound as unctuous as 1970s cheeseballs from Lobo to Jim Croce to the Guess Who's Burton Cummings. Songs that probably seemed vulnerable as demos have turned greedily narcissistic.

"Last Beautiful Girl"... would be good enough to inspire a wholesale reassessment of Matchbox Twenty if the material surrounding it weren't so average.

There's nothing lasting or substantive about the 12 tracks (plus one hidden one) that make up Mad Season.

This new album... sees them mutating into less of a rock outfit and more of what is commonly called "adult contemporary" -- in other words, music for soccer moms and rich yuppies to play really loud in their BMWs-