Most pop fans know the Goo Goo Dolls as the schlock-rock balladeers behind "Name" and "Iris," two of the most ubiquitous radio hits of the late '90s. The band's second-biggest calling card is the sanitized sex appeal of ditzy blond frontman John Rzeznik, whose pretty voice and prettier looks attract teenyboppers and their moms alike. The Goos are rock-and-roll nice guys, respectable enough to appear at all the major post-September 11 benefit concerts and lighthearted enough to show their patriotism by covering Tom Petty's "American Girl."

On their seventh disc, Gutterflower (Warner Bros.), which came out this past Tuesday, the Goos continue to age gracefully, and that's something few rock bands have proved capable of. At heart, they've always been a scruffy power trio who like to go soft once in a while: ballads aside, their two previous hit albums ('95's A Boy Named Goo and '98's Dizzy Up the Girl, both on Warner Bros.) were as loud as they were catchy, and before that they were signed to Metal Blade. Gutterflower is no big departure, but the band don't crank it up as often as they used to. Which suits them fine -- Rzeznik has always been more lite-rock-romantic than anything else, and now he's old enough to stop pretending otherwise.

The disc's first single, "Here Is Gone," is a melancholy acoustic rocker along the lines of the Dizzy hits "Slide" and "Broadway." Those two songs were stylistic and commercial landmarks for the band: before Dizzy came out, Top 40 radio wouldn't touch anything by the Goos except for their ballads. "Here Is Gone" is not as dreamy as "Slide," but its lovelorn melodrama rocks just as gently. "And I wanted to be all you need/Somehow here is gone," Rzeznik sings as the band swell into the chorus with typical urgency. Like all their best songs, it's sappy and a little bit vapid -- but when it comes to old-fashioned guitar pop with a lump in its throat, this one's hard to beat.

As mainstream pop stars go, the Goos have an unusual history, one that becomes more worth repeating with every hit single. Inspired by the ragged pop punk of the Replacements, Rzeznik and bassist Robby Takac formed the band in Buffalo in the mid '80s. Their first couple of albums came out on Metal Blade, the underground metal label that launched Slayer and met with some college-radio success. They signed to Warner Bros. during the alternative-rock boom, releasing the '93 disc Superstar Car Wash to modest critical acclaim and disappointing sales numbers.

That's where the dream would have ended for a lot of rock bands, and it almost did for the Goos. But the runaway success of "Name" in '95 changed everything. They hadn't altered their sound one bit, yet suddenly they were major pop contenders after a decade as alterna-rock also-rans. Their late-breaking good fortune also allowed them to outlast most of their peers, including some who had been far more successful. By the time "Iris" rescued them from their one-hit-wonder status in '98, the scene they had emerged from was almost completely marginalized. These days, Soul Asylum are a historical footnote and the Goos sell more albums than the biggest '80s college-rock band of them all, R.E.M. If you had told Rzeznik that in '87, he probably would have spit beer in your face.

Before their breakthrough, the band were either tolerated or ignored in rock-hipster circles, where they were considered a harmless Replacements ripoff. Now they're criminalized for ushering in a new era of blandness in rock and held responsible for everyone from Third Eye Blind and Matchbox Twenty to Lifehouse and the Calling. That kind of criticism is as catty as it is warranted: there's never been any glamor in umpteenth-generation classic-rock revivalism, especially when it's blatantly marketed at teenage girls.

Still, there's plenty to admire about the Goos' workmanlike attitude, especially if you've spent any time in their snow-blanketed neck of the woods. "Broadway" is the sound of countless white-trash families piling into their mini-vans on the way to a Bills game, destined to lose but unwilling to give up hope. It's the sound of Vincent Gallo sitting at the kitchen table in silence next to his Sinatra-singing father in Buffalo '66, the artlessly definitive '98 indie film about a hard-luck kid who goes to jail after losing a bet on the Bills. It's the sound of Foreigner frontman (and Rochester native) Lou Gramm singing the same kind of sentimental no-frills rock in the face of similar criticism -- a debt Rzeznik once acknowledged by claiming the band originally wanted to call itself Dizzy Foreigner 4.

Listen to the Goos' heartland rock from this perspective and their ability to peddle it into the upper echelons of the pop charts becomes more than just vindication for the ultimate commercial failure of the Replacements. Next to the disposable dance pop it shares time with on MTV, it's downright subversive. To old-school rock types, a song like "Slide" is little more than reheated Mellencamp; to the Destiny's Child generation, it's a glossy version of their parents' music with lyrics they'd love to read on a note passed to them in class. As an introduction to rock, well, kids could do much worse.

Gutterflower won't end up on anyone's year-end list of cool rock albums, but it's not just for pre-teens and their baby-sitters. The pretty fuzz-guitar riff that opens "Big Machine," the first song on the album, will appeal to anyone who dug previous Goo rock hits like "Long Way Down" and "Naked" -- or Dinosaur Jr., or any number of alterna-rock bygones. Love and the melody from Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill" have gotten the best of Rzeznik: he's torn in pieces, his heart is reeling, he's blind and waiting for you. His songwriting is continuing to mature, but he still hasn't gotten over his arena-rock jones.

"There is not an over-sappy track on this record and no strings," he said in a recent MTV interview, sounding as if he had something to prove. For better or worse, he's right: the band's trademark sweeping choruses are everywhere, but they never try to match the overblown grandeur of "Iris." By default, the big acoustic ballad is "Sympathy," which forgoes the cinematic approach in favor of a simple mandolin-and-percussion backdrop. "Everything's all wrong, yeah," Rzeznik allows in his best campfire sing-along voice, sounding as comfortably mellowed out as another lapsed pop-punker, Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong. Time will tell whether the track can live up to the commercial standards of "Iris," but it's an æsthetic improvement either way.

Part of the Goos' slacker appeal has always been the songwriting contributions of Takac, who gets to sing four songs per album no matter how big Rzeznik's hits are. To me, Takac's songs are an important symbol of the band's punk insouciance: it's as if Rzeznik couldn't be bothered to write more songs, and anyway he'd rather just listen to his friend sing a few. Takac is a more straightforward writer, one who relishes the simple melodies and twisted humor of pop punk; one of his "Name"-era contributions was called "Slave Girl," a cover of a song by the obscure Australian garage band the Lime Spiders. He's as energetic as ever on Gutterflower, leaving a sugar-pop mark of his own on the memorable kissoff "You Never Know."

Rzeznik is the star of the show, though, and he gets a little snotty himself on the anthemic "What a Scene." "Now you're a supermarket punk-rock television comedy," he snarls at the top of the second verse, letting his cynicism get the best of him until a "na na na" coda shows up and makes everything okay. When it comes down to it, he's just a small-town boy, and the exasperation he occasionally feels toward Hollywood women and other kinds of rock-star bullshit sounds about as real as it can coming from a teen idol. His righteous streak never lasts long, though, and he's feeling insecure again on "It's Over," which starts with a weird Chris Isaak imitation and a superfluous drum loop but soon settles into a typical Goo comfort-rock groove. "I can't find the answer when you're gone," he sings, no longer able to take solace in a "na na na" chorus.

Pop songs are therapy for Rzeznik, but he rarely works up to any kind of catharsis -- his songs always end up a little mopy, which is probably what earned him his reputation as the patron saint of bland. But his knack for stringing together a few evocative lines over a soaring melody is more formidable than that label suggests, and it's as sharp as ever on Gutterflower. The album title itself is a fine example of his cheeseball-pop poetry. It's also an apt summation of his greatest skill as a writer: the ability to wring beauty out of emotional wreckage.

What's more, he has a knack for leaving a telling epilogue at the end of his albums; here, it's the arena-sized anthem "Truth Is a Whisper," a dark rocker assembled from shards of the Police's "Message in a Bottle" and Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." There's a little bit of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" in there too, but Rzeznik's little-boy-lost lyrics make a case for his own place in the classic-rock pantheon. "You know all I am/Can you teach me to believe in something?" is the song's key lament, a line of quiet desperation that sounds more like a prayer than like one of the singer's usual romantic pleas. It's not the deepest question rock has ever asked. But it sounds just right over a stolen Neil Young riff, and sometimes that's deep enough.

Issue Date: April 12 - 18, 2002