I was raised in an odd household where my mom didn't really let me listen to modern rock except on select brief moments...it wasn't until I moved to a more conservative area of the USA where disk jockeys weren't quite as colorful when I was able to experience the current state of rock music. That was in 1997. So I missed the initial wave of Goo Goo Dolls' rise to fame. I didn't have any exposure to them until "Iris" came out. Then I bought their prior album, A BOY NAMED GOO, and of course heard the song "Name", not realizing at the time that it was their foot in the door of mainstream success. I think I fell in love with about 70% of the album. The last two songs were junk and there was maybe 2 or 3 others that were kinda "meh" but not bad. Maybe closer to 60%. Aaanyway. I just recently heard this CD. It's everything good about A BOY NAMED GOO except the song "Name" or anything w/ similar qualities. Except the things that were great about A BOY NAMED GOO are amped up a notch. There's at atmospheric quality to the songs that ABNG just didn't capture. ABNG had a more plain sound, which the tonality of the cover art captured rather well. This album doesn't have anything real obvious going on in the production, but the songs are just more intense and feely. The cover - art on this captures that, sorta. On the surface, it just looks like a bland cover that was put together without much thought and that's probably somewhat true. But it works. The music speaks for itself. Obviously, these reviews are not particularly helpful in deciding what music to buy, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, or at least proceed with caution. You can listen to pretty much anything without anything other than time invested if you know where to look (legally, too!4real! I can't say more without this being scrapped).