Hinder

Those rock-is-dead pronouncements we hear periodically ignore the genre's cyclical nature. Every time the style seems bound for the grave, it reanimates and begins stalking the public again, usually in a form that's damn close to what was previously regarded as DOA. Which brings us to Hinder, an Oklahoma City band on tour with Papa Roach and Buckcherry that's as conservative as Dick Cheney when it comes to creative risk-taking. Extreme Behavior, a 2005 disc that slowly became a dominant seller, includes plenty of politically incorrect lyrics about boozing and boffing, and thumbs up for that. Unfortunately, frontman Austin Winkler's personality-free voice is an amalgam of every standard-order hard-rock belter to emerge in the past three decades, and the music at the core of tracks such as "Get Stoned" and "Bliss (I Don't Wanna Know)" suggests the sort of diluted grunge major labels released during the mid-'90s when the actual innovators of the movement proved too ornery for effective marketing. Wouldn't want anything to Hinder that...