Eve 6

Eve 6 has managed a few blasts of radio-ready teen angst made palatable by expensive guitar crunch, snappy choruses, and front man Max Collins' practiced bellow; the band's debut single, "Inside Out," still sounds pretty good on mix CDs, and 2000's "Here's to the Night" could pass for a featherweight "With or Without You" for kids born during the '90s. So the group's slot on some future VH1 retrospective is assured. But the new It's All in Your Head, which features a cover that looks like a headless He-Man figurine, finds these high-school laureates attempting gravity their tunes can't support: "Are you feeling that you're on the brink of spilling some red in the sink?" Collins asks on "Friend of Mine," a snappy-chorus-less blast of expensive guitar crunch that could belong to anyone with a major-label recording budget. Later, he observes that "rape is a word with a face" and remembers walking "the promenade in the rain with Velcro shoes and an ice cream stain," which could be a chilling juxtaposition but instead just feels confused. Maybe that's high school, though.