i agree with a lot of that yes! most of it in fact

i've been listening to the album a lot recently (i still don't like it) but i'm finding that a lot of the songs could have been so much better if they'd recorded them slightly differently...

personally i've found that a lot of the verses are very good, and riff-driven...

where i think the album fails is in the choruses..

at least the chorus of undivided allows jon's voice to shine a little - and undivided is a song i have really begun to like a lot (yes, with the exception of the lyrics)...

Bounce is probably too much of a "shove the message down your throat" sort of a song, and i think they could have done a song with the same concept much more subtle - it would have been much more powerful that way also...

... but then again without sounding politically racist, it does fit in perfectly with the simplistic primary-school teachings of Bush's administration in the US