“So Alive” promises, verbatim, to “sing it like an anthem” but fails to reach the dynamic heights of “The Pin” or “Over and Over”. The lead single comes late on the album in the form of “So Alive”, a baffling choice when there are radio-ready tracks like “The Pin”, custom-built to appeal to a broad spectrum of casual listeners, earlier on the album. It’s underpinned by those same big pop-rock drums but there’s no saving the track. “Free of Me” is full of weird, snotty vocals, and is one of those songs about how glad the guy is that the girl finally left his sorry ass because she deserves better, or whatever. The title track is notable only for how completely unmemorable it is - a bad sign if ever there was one.
The biggest criticism there is for those tracks is that they are formulaic, and it’s hard to locate the unselfconscious sincerity in them that made Dizzy Up the Girl so appealing in its heyday. What I want to say - and I’m not sure how much of a burn this is in 2016 - is that you will really enjoy the first four tracks on Boxes if you maintain an active, borderline unhealthy nostalgia for Matchbox Twenty (and I do). The next three tracks follow more or less the same formula, with a notably nice performance from Sydney Sierota on “Flood”. “Over and Over”, the opening track, has the sort of big drums and shout-ready chorus that the band’s found success with in the past. Goo Goo Dolls get that expectation, if the first few tracks on Boxes are anything to go by. An “Iris” for an aimless 20-something instead of an angsty teen. So even though years of watching the magic die in bands that had a good moment way back when has prepared me to hear this album with the bar set low, I was still hoping for an “Iris”, but updated.
Plus it gave us “Iris” and “Slide”, two of the best scream-along-with-your-friends songs of the turn of the millennium. It’s been 18 years since Goo Goo Dolls put out Dizzy Up the Girl, a record which, for all its predictable anthemic pop rock tropes, is a pretty great listen even now.
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