Ginuwine's "Pony" was the first belch of spacy R&B from the Timbaland/ Missy Elliott clan. Quite a literal belch, in fact -- its signature hook was a bassline that sounded like Zapp Roger's vocoder after a mighty swig of bicarb. With car skids, why-must-I-chase-the-cat? pants, and Pac-Man bleeps propelling the rhythm forward, it was a poor excuse for a song. But it was one helluva ride that burped right in your face.

Jim Farber invokes "Pony" in his terrific New York Daily News review of Collective Soul's new album, Dosage. At first, these might seem like unlikely bedmates. But Dosage is 1,000 milligrams of poor excuses for songs, merely accumulations of neat ideas as opposed to units that meld their disparate elements into an integrated whole.

A broken shard of Brit-pop guitar ping-pongs between speakers, then anchors the beat in "Heavy." That's Neat Idea Number One. Number Two comes immediately after in the form of a great funky-heavy guitar riff, its stop-time figure begging to be sampled. A string quartet embellishes "Needs" not because the song particularly needs one but because ... well, the Beatles used one and Collective Soul claim the Beatles as one of their main influences. This is what happens when your frontman spends eight years as a sound engineer. It's clear that resident tinkerer Ed Roland situates studio star wars and pristine production above all else in his hierarchy of musical concerns.

Certainly, lyrics are at the bottom of the list. Now and again they do hone in on some vague adolescent aggression tropes. But I suspect that deep down Ed Roland finds them a burden, a task he's resigned to because pop songs have lyrics. Hell, I bet he thinks a band is a necessary evil too. After all, he did record the debut entirely by himself. All this just gets in the way of him doing what he loves most -- twiddling knobs, adjusting levels, etc. It's no surprise to read his track-by-track discussion of Dosage and find that he rarely talks about what a song means but rather obsesses on its meticulous creation like an antique dealer revealing the most cautious method for polishing the legs of an ottoman.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this philosophy, of course. In fact, its manifesto happens to be one of the most gorgeous tunes of the 70's, Boston's "More Than A Feeling," sculpted by another fascinating engineer (frontman Tom Scholz). Each dosage of Dosage aspires to Scholz's platonic ideal, where real people and messy emotions slip away into some Zen-like techno-utopia. Maybe that's why so many of them mention "hope" (as Roland pines on "Compliment," "there's something more than the world out there").

So just as "More Than A Feeling" is a great song (i.e., an effective one) in spite of itself, the many fine moments on Dosage are a matter of serendipity. Whenever "Slow" reaches its trippy, ELO chorus or Roland belts it out all sad-like on "Compliment," it sounds great yet still feels like a lucky accident. Nothing inherently wrong with that either; I take my heart-tugging wherever I can get it. But all these neat ideas don't add up to a record I'll remember in December, much less probably ever play again. It's ye olde "the sum of the parts is less than the whole‚" problem. Like Fiorello LaGuardia, I'm left to wonder "what does it all mean?"

But also like LaGuardia, Roland's neat ideas are perfect candidates to get reincarnated as hip-hop source material. If he's going to ignore rhythm and hedonism and historical recontextualization (everything that makes a lot of hip-hop and f----me tracks like "Pony" so much more resonant than anything Collective Soul will ever record), then someone else ought to unleash the power of that great riff from "Heavy" into one unrelenting loop. PE, call your lawyers.

Until then, Collective Soul's music will continue to sing to those who find rhythm daunting; they're fun at keg parties, strip joints and football games (where music is mere soundtrack), with recontextualizing history a non-existent concern (wouldn't be to their advantage). I'm thinking of the rural/suburban jocks/cheerleaders and future adult alternatives in "Varsity Blues," which, incidentally, includes Dosage's "Run" on its soundtrack. That last one is a real example of collective soul, because where teens with the varsity blues hear the "I've got a long way to run" chorus as a recognition of the obstacles ahead of them in life, Roland can still sing it as a sort of comparison-homage to his idols Elton John, Jeff Lynne and the Beatles. You gotta hand it to the guy for realizing his considerable limitations.