Goo Goo Dolls - Gutterflower CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

finds the band still addressing the agonies and ecstasies of life after class ends.

The group, originally a Buffalo band called the Sex Maggots, started out playing rough-hewn rock along the lines of the Replacements and Soul Asylum. And like those bands, the Goos -- singer-guitarist John Rzeznik, bassist-vocalist Robby Takac and original drummer George Tutuska -- earned a heart-on-their-sleeves reputation for uproarious, ragged-but-right live shows, even as the big time eluded them.

After nearly ten years together, in 1995, the band's fifth album, A Boy Named Goo, spun off the hit single "Name," and the trio saw a route off the endless road of vans, a blindly devoted cult following and one-night stands. That route was the same one that opened up for Soul Asylum around the same time, not to mention a generation of metal bands before them: the power ballad. This wasn't any kind of cynical sellout. Beneath their enthusiastic din, the band's songs, particularly those written by Rzeznik, always revealed a penchant for melody, memorable hooks and discernible structure. Acoustic-guitar sweetening, a bit of lift to the choruses and a nudge out of red-zone distortion for the electric guitars provided just the right frame for Rzeznik's rumpled, sensitive-guy persona. The girls got it. Tutuska was replaced by Mike Malinin, who also had decided it was upward-mobility time. At long last, the Goos were rock stars.

That status solidified when the City of Angels soundtrack made "Iris," from the Goos' 1998 album, Dizzy Up the Girl, ubiquitous on the airwaves and music-video channels. While enjoying their deserved success, however, the Goos clearly had become concerned about being perceived as a cuddly pop band by younger fans who didn't have the slightest idea who the Replacements were. To restore a sense of the band's thrash-friendly past, last year the Goos released the wryly titled What I Learned About Ego, Opinion, Art and Commerce, a twenty-two-track career overview that ignored the hits in favor of rawer (if remixed) songs dating back to the group's early records on Metal Blade.

Now, on Gutterflower, the band's first album of new material in more than three years, the Goos attempt to split the difference, for the most part, successfully. The first single, "Here Is Gone," hews deftly to the hitmaking formula defined by "Name" and "Iris." A midtempo ballad, it's simultaneously delicate and big-sounding, filled with desperate yearning. By way of contrast, though, the album opens with the rhythmic blast of "Big Machine,