"All I care about it is you and me and us and now," lead singer Taylor Hanson declares on the exuberant new Hanson single "If Only." But it's a moment of uncharacteristic confidence. Before the song is finished, Taylor and his brothers are just not certain if they'll have the guts to follow through on that impulse. "If only I had the guts to feel this way," Taylor sings, and the joyous music swirling about him lets you know he really hopes he can. It's just such feelings of fear and uncertainty -- and hope -- that drive the trio.
Those who've peered beneath the teen group's bubblegum fagade already know this. Hanson's signature hit, "MMMbop," was about the scary unpredictability of change, and virtually every cut on the group's powerful multiplatinum debut, "Middle of Nowhere," was preoccupied with facing an uncertain future.
Many of Hanson's fans, particularly their adult ones, will admit to enjoying the group only sheepishly, but Hanson's music is unabashed. With songs that looked unblinkingly at runaway kids, universal alienation and the death of a loved one, "Middle of Nowhere" rejected the notion that Hanson are a mere guilty pleasure. You could even say that the record's fervent themes argued against the stunted conceptions of human emotion that lead people to feel guilty about pleasure in the first place.
If anything, "This Time Around" makes these darker themes more explicit. The songs have titles like "You Never Know," "If Only" and "Dying to Be Alive." Isaac, Taylor and Zac -- who all sing and play guitar, keyboards and drums, respectively -- respond to uncertainty with an expressed desire to fight, before it's too late, for a life created rather than received. "All I know is that fear has got to go," Taylor insists on "This Time Around," the album's marvelous first single. Later, on "Dying to Be Alive," he sings: "We all come tumbling down/No matter how strong, we all turn to the ground ... you can't just leave your life to fate." Throughout the song, Taylor's soul-inspired shouts hit every bit as hard as the lyrics. (Now 17, he's three years older than he was on the first record, and his voice sounds at least that much more mature.) Admittedly, Hanson's self-composed songs never arrive at any conclusions you haven't heard before, but as life lessons go, carpe diem isn't a bad one.
"This Time Around" does find Hanson tinkering, just a bit, with their sound. Since their debut, teen pop has all but taken over the radio -- a disastrous turn that's often traced, unfairly, back to Hanson's earlier success. But to distinguish themselves from Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, Hanson have beefed up their sound. Melodic rock 'n' soul remains the focus, but it's now executed with blazing guitars (teen bluesman Jonny Lang appears on a couple of tracks), beefier drums and samples from sometime Beck sidekick DJ Swamp. Occasionally the changes smack of an attempt at hipster cred, and sometimes they make an occasional foray into Blues Traveler-ish groove rock (that band's harmonica-playing frontman, John Popper, is here, too). But even these missteps -- more senior project than sophomore slump -- are salvaged by the trio's unerring knack for the irresistible pop chorus.
The biggest disappointments are sonic. The crunchy chords on a wonderful power-pop number called "Runaway Run," for instance, need to explode out of the speakers, not dribble. The gospel choir on "Dying to Be Alive" (headed by Sly & the Family Stone's Rose Stone) should release the song heavenward, but the voices are buried so far back in the mix that their ascension feels more rumored than achieved. Time and again, the songs and their arrangements are spot-on, but then Stephen Lironi's wall-of-sludge production dulls the effect of the instrumental hooks. (Personal to Isaac, Taylor and Zac: Next time out, you guys might want to consider someone like Adam Schmitt to produce a few tracks. Hunt down a copy of his great 1991 album "World So Bright," and you'll hear precisely the blend of sweet-and-rough you were born to make.)
In other words, "This Time Around" falls prey to some of the very problems that plague so much current popular music. But in more significant ways, Hanson rises above their moment: earnest, instead of winking; explicitly connected to a rock 'n' soul tradition that's supposed to be passi; unafraid to offer ambivalence, rather than naive happy endings. "If only I had the guts to feel this way," they sing, and while the boys' future remains a "secret that no one knows" (as "MMMBop" phrased it), you have to feel optimistic that guts -- at least of the emotional variety -- aren't going to be an issue. The more pressing question is whether they'll find an audience with the courage to really listen.
