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Review: 'Goo Goo Dolls'
'Boxes'   

-  Album: 'Boxes' -  Label: 'Warner Bros.'
-  Genre: 'Rock' -  Release Date: '6th May 2016'

Our Rating:
With a 30-year career and 13 previous albums behind them, Goo Goo Dolls have no shortage of history or heritage. But commercial success breeds a desire to chase more commercial success, and since the release of their 1995 album ‘A Boy Named Goo’, the band have pursued an increasingly accessible, commercial sound.

Fair enough, if that’s what they’re happy doing: it certainly pays the bills and no doubt drubs the 9-5 as a means of doing so. But ‘Boxes’ is not an ‘alternative’ rock album, but an example of the mainstream’s idea of what alternative sounds like, which is essentially pop music with guitars, an alternative to R’n’B or straight ahead pop a la Katy Perry or One Direction or whatever the flavour of the week is. Boxes is what happens when alternative bands sell out.

It starts big, bold and cinematic, with ‘Over & Over’, but uplifting as it is, it’s also very much tried and tested, made-for-advertisements anthemic in every respect. There’s irony to be found in a title like ‘Souls in the Machine’, the clap-along stadium bluster of the sound and the refrain (which centres around the title) contains more truth than the band would likely ever be willing to admit.

Back in the 80s, it used to be called AOR: the vast production, the strings and sincere delivery off earnest (but immensely cliché) lyrics with lines about chasing shadows and floods and keeping warm on cold nights, with occasional string augmentation – part 80s Kate Bush, part Fleetwood Mac (circa ‘Tango in the Night, of course) are all designed to appeal to a certain sense of longing, a yearning, and a desire for empowerment for the early midlifer pondering their place in the big wide world.

But ‘The Pin’ sounds like a second-rate amalgamation of Big Country and The Alarm, as performed by Coldplay (hell, it even nabs a bit of its melody from ‘Yellow’), and the less said about the overblown bollocks of ‘Free of Me’ the better. There are so many other comparisons too pompous major-league acts I could throw in but don’t really feel the need. Life’s too short, and as they’d probably tell you with a platitude delivered with fist-pumping assurance, it’s there for the talking.

For all of its large scale and grandiose universality, ‘Boxes’ lacks any real emotional bite, and feels more like an exercise in ticking boxes than thinking outside of them.

Goo Goo Dolls Online

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Goo Goo Dolls - Boxes