Hanson is one of those boy bands you can't believe you were so in love with once upon a time. But once you turn the radio past 94.9FM and a snippet of "MMMbop" squeezes its way back into your heart, you forget all your inhibitions and crank up that jam. Mentally, you're mentally back in middle school, each lyric rolling miraculously off your tongue and making your morning commute bouncy and carefree.
With their eighth album, Shout It Out, the band of brothers has brought me back to that mental place with another batch of perfectly-packaged power pop cookies. It's eerie that they don't seem to have aged much, in looks or vocal ranges, since their breakthrough in 1996. Their music has always been about life and love through the eyes of someone much too young to be world-weary (what 10-year-old seriously knows anything about relationships, or cares enough to break the cootie shield?), but now it seems they have finally matured.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.