Quick Spins

GOOD MORNING REVIVAL

Good Charlotte

To be in a best-selling mall punk band is, apparently, to suffer. Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy devote great portions of their new albums to the Joblike struggles of heavily mascaraed, dance floor-dwelling rock stars, territory that had been strip-mined long before the arrival of Good Charlotte's latest, the tepid "Good Morning Revival."

Frontmen Joel and Benji Madden spend much of "Revival" locked in struggle against deeply uninteresting foes: shallow Hollywood types, club-going haters.

That the members of a band whose debut hit, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," jousted winningly against whiny rich people have now become whiny rich people is an irony lost only on them. "Keep Your Hands Off My Girl" is the worst offender, a train-wreck of an almost hip-hop track on which Joel Madden namechecks his own clothing line and boasts about dating a model who "stays in her place."

The band's previous fascination with rap, new wave and dance beats continues apace: "Broken Hearts Parade" borrows heavily from My Chemical Romance; the superb "The River" is propulsive demi-metal; "Dance Floor Anthem" is suburban post-punk, craven but likable.

Good Charlotte's fondness for vocoder-style voice distortion and other superfluous sonic space-fillers takes up more room than it should. The best tracks here are the quietest ones: "A Beautiful Place," an examination of the messiness and struggles of family life, is the sort of thing they do best.

And the relationship postmortem "Where Would We Be" is an exercise in Hilary Duff nostalgia more shamelessly mopey, and more sincere, than anything that surrounds it.

DOWNLOAD THESE: "The River," "Where Would We Be"

-- Allison Stewart