Ubiquitous, yet invisible. That's the enviable position U.S. rock group Collective Soul find themselves in.

They've sold about eight-million albums in just five years, but would you recognize them if they passed you on the street?

Thought not.

"We've been like a stealth band. People hear us, but they don't see us," says drummer Shane Evans, whose group plays the Jack Singer on March 8.

"We have the best of both worlds. We get to maintain some anonymity and we get people to hear our music constantly."

"Constantly" is just about right.

Their riff-based, hook-laden singles -- including Shine, Gel, December, The World I Know and Precious Declaration -- saturated the airwaves and earned the Stockbridge, Ga., quintet the reputation as a grunge-lite group.

"People threw us in that category because they didn't know where to put us. They didn't know where our music exactly fit in. Maybe they still don't," Evans says.

Dosage, their fourth and latest CD, should clarify where their allegiances lie.

From the beautiful-woman-in-peril cover art (reminiscent of those feminist-baiting Scorpions album jackets) to the sheer heft of the music, Dosage sounds like a band fully embracing their '70s-rock influences. There's a smattering of prog-rock keyboards, guitars that are bulked up on steroids, and an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink production (courtesy of Collective Soul's singer-guitarist-songwriter Ed Roland) that revels in the sort of bombast rarely heard since the heydays of Queen and Electric Light Orchestra.

"I can't say we consciously embraced '70s influences ... but there are certain songs that are tributes. I think Ed wrote Run as a tribute to The Beatles, (ELO's) Jeff Lynne and Elton John, who were really strong influences in his life," Evans says.

"With Dosage, we wanted to move in a different direction and give our fans a new reason to like us."

Collective Soul is coming off a difficult third album, Disciplined Breakdown, which went gold in the U.S., but failed to sell in the huge numbers like its predecessors.

Of course, Disciplined Breakdown was recorded while the band was embroiled in an 18-month lawsuit with their former manager, since settled. The band was broke and ended up recording the third album in a cabin just outside of their hometown.

"We were really limited as to what we could do because we were recording in a log cabin and, if you listen really close to that record, you can tell it was (recorded) in a cabin. Ultimately, (the lawsuit) affected the music.

"With this record, the music was what we worried about, what we talked about, what we argued about.

"It was always about the music and never about a lawsuit."