Twenty years and some “tearful apologies” after their fall-out, Veruca Salt‘s original lineup is joining the ’90’s reunion-album cycle sweeping the former grunge community like the plague for the band’s fifth drop, Ghost Notes.

Portrait of a comeback album: We’ll all communally scratch the itches both of nostalgia and rebellion, and turn a blind eye to the cash grab, like we do every time. We’ll pepper it with hyperbolic terms like ‘visceral’. Then, maybe two years later, we’ll actually give it an honest assessment.

Just for fun, let’s try to skip ahead to that.

There’s an overall sonic vibe of AC/DC-meets-Sheryl Crow going on here, leaning towards the latter. It’s definitely pop-oriented, and that works quite well in some cases. The first few tracks are weak, though. Unmemorable opener “The Gospel According to Saint Me” chugs along inoffensively as Post and co-lyricist Lina Gordon sing about the depths of their personalities with fairly shallow metaphors like “I’m not a black box, Fort Knox, time to change the locks.” Follow-up “Black and Blonde” seems to detail brutal physical abuse with instant-gem lines like “I am the greatest fucking thing that ever happened to you,” but then pairs it with an incredibly generic rawk riff. After that, “Eyes on You” filters love through a watered-down take on the guitar line from “Dirty Little Secret” by The All-American Rejects (which had previously been considered un-dumb-down-able).

It picks up after that with “Prince of Wales,” their nod to the fallout at the titular hotel where the original lineup dissolved on a 1997 tour. It co-opts the “Sweet Child O Mine” chords, and is 90s alt-poppy enough to fit perfectly in a Melissa Joan Hart movie. They attack the subject matter delicately, repeating just a handful of lines so as to not tear out the sutures. But the real treasure is “Empty Bottle,” easily their best track to date. It soundtracks Post and Gordon’s reconciliation, wholeheartedly embracing bittersweet nostalgia, acknowledging that it’s worth it to take the bad with the good as long as you face it with your musical soulmate:

Empty Bottle

But for every “Empty Bottle,” there’s one to two “Laughing in the Sugar Bowl“s. There, the back-and-forth shouts remind much more of Avril Lavigne‘s “Girlfriend” than Toni Basil‘s “Hey Mickey.” It forces a cringe. Even if it isn’t true, you get the impression that it’s a corporate imitation of an imitation of punk-rock snottiness.

“Triage,” “Lost to Me” and are solid cuts, too, but they’re averaged out by the the power-chord saturated dead space of vanilla rock which makes up more of the album than the hits. It briefly, during “Empty Bottle,” clobbers your emotions hard with a sledgehammer, but the fortuitous timing is the band’s, and the industry’s, worst enemy.