Songs From an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile

As the album unfolds, certain themes of regret, sadness, and longing run to the surface, but they're all coated in glittering pop melodies and big rock riffs that mask the emotions of the songs.... their best, most consistent effort to date...

While love- and life-torn Alexakis might lyrically be working familiar terrain here, he has the smarts to place his odes to abuse and regret into an intriguing assortment of different contexts, making this album well worth listening to

The new album is looser in the rhythm, has less wall of slash, relatively more lilt and funk, and more variety in the sound ... but in general the music is too diffuse.

The band has introduced cleanser and furniture polish into the summer cleaning, sweeping away the rough edges and brightening up the melodies, which results in the group's best-sounding album to date.

Everclear's first collection since 1997's "So Much For The Afterglow" is an unabashed love letter to the '70s, when AM radio still ruled and pop music was simple, good fun.

He has created a record that fully embraces the inclinations we all sometimes have to find a tune with strong enough melody to hum through the day.

The arrangements lurch from unplugged folksiness to orchestrated Sinatraesque balladeering to faux late-period Beach Boys. When he's backed by acoustic guitars and mandolins and creating a back-porch ambiance, Alexakis could be a cut-rate Steve Earle. But none of these gimmicks can obscure the reality that the melodies are once again a drab, uninspiring lot.

"Learning How to Smile" has compelling subject matter in its reminiscence of love among the white trash ruins, but its climactic strings and cheery chords feel like a theme song to the latest WB teen-sex drama.

Songs From an American Movie sounds orchestral and homespun at once: Lustrous, fancy strings on one song give way to a slap-happy ukulele on the next. Yet it's too much of both and not enough of either.

While convincingly earnest and certainly ambitious, the result is formulaic, and lacks the free-wheelin', soulful magic of the original

It's unfortunate, then, that most of Vol.1 winds up sounding like rejected Aerosmith ballads. Which is to say, epic, overproduced anthems made to accompany Ben Affleck anthropomorphizing animal crackers on Liv Tyler's stomach.

It wants a hit so bad -- wants to be so many things to so many people -- that you can feel the songs audibly buckling from all the promises it doles out.

The punky edge to the band has been all but jettisoned, in favor of slick production, orchestral backdrops, and cloying melodies that render even the occasionally dark lyrics (mostly about divorce this time) surprisingly limp.

It vacillates between insignificant fluff and confessional songs that have nothing new to confess.