In 1995, a southern California band that had irresistible ska/pop/rock songs broke through hugely, selling ten million copies of their sophomore effort Tragic Kingdom, and with almost all the media attention going to sultry lead singer Gwen Stefani, they nearly broke up despite finally making it after almost a decade of struggling. The band of which I speak is No Doubt, and earlier this year, 5 long years after they had started to break through with ubitquotous singles like Just a Girl, Spiderwebs, and Don't Speak, they released the follow up, entitled Return of Saturn.

I was one of the ten million people who purchases Tragic Kingdom, drawn to the poppy hooks and the irresistible melodies that pervaded that record. However, I was not at all excited about the release of this record. Not that I didn't like the band, but I was just kind of indifferent to it. I finally ended up buying it a few weeks ago, intrigued by the variety I had heard on the 3 singles I had heard from it.

The first song I had heard was New, which had also been prominently featured on the Go movie soundtrack. In a nutshell, this song was classic No Doubt, gentle, building guitar hook, the building instrumentation until the climax of the song. The lyrics pointed at a new Gwen, and the other thing that caught my ears was the much improved bass playing of Tony Kanal.

The first real single from the album also kicks it off, Ex-Girlfriend. Musically, the song is schizophrenic (for lack of a better term), melding a frenetic riff from guitarist Tom Dumont to a drawn out vocal job from Gwen melding with a beat that is almost hip hop from drummer Adrian Young. I like this song a lot, it is possibly the most creative song the band has ever done, and it deserved a lot more airplay than it got, but upbeat, somewhat joyous (even if not lyrically) songs have no place in today's radio dominated by angst-rock that is so pretentious it makes Marilyn Manson seem real, but I digress.

The catchiest song on the record, and the second single, is entitled Simple Kind of Life. This is the type of track that had it gotten more support from radio and MTV, could've blown this album up to insane proportions the way Don't Speak did for Tragic Kingdom, but I've already ranted about how bad radio is, so I won't go there. This however, is the opposite of Don't Speak, a somewhat sappy love song that shows Stefani questioning (even if not totally regretting) her past choices.

Onto track three, and yes, you guessed it, it's single number three as well, Bathwater. I'm not wild about this song at all, and I find it kind of degrading and disturbing, even though the jumpy atmosphere on the chorus is, for lack of a better term again, pretty cool.

So what does the rest of this album hold? Well, much like the 4 songs mentioned above, it's a mixed bag. Songs like Six Feet Under and Staring Problem recall a lot of the material on Tragic Kingdom, but then there's songs like Marry Me and Magic's In the Makeup where they may as well be one track, they sound so similar.

Return of Saturn, in reality, is a growth lyrically for the band, and possibly musically as well, although it comes off more as a transitional album more than anything else. The band's obvious new wave influences shine through here, but it's just too much of a mixed bag to recommend. The next No Doubt album should give a clearer picture of exactly what the band was trying, but ultimately failed, to accomplish here.



Recommended: No