Backstreet’s back, alright!

Only this time, critics are not grooving to the music.

The Backstreet Boys have returned with their seventh studio album entitled, This Is Us. But reviews are in, and they are not in favour of the boy (er, man?) band.

The album was released on October 6, and music critics across North America are in agreement: that sure, the Boys deliver a few catchy tunes, but that at the end of the day the album just sounds like a regurgitation of their previous hits.

“Though the Boys were one of the biggest pop acts of the ’90s, they largely hand the reins off to their producers here, who include Lady Gaga’s hit-maker RedOne, Jim Jonsin and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder,” writes August Brown of the Los Angeles Times. “Cuts like ‘Bye Bye Love’ and ‘Straight Through My Heart’ have au courant hotel-lounge decadence to them, and ‘She’s a Dream’ benefits from the light melodic touch of guest T-Pain. But when the boys extol a lady’s virtues because ‘she don’t even know I’m a celebrity,’ the lyric rings of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Other critics agree.

Elysa Gardner of USA Today writes that the album’s songs don’t ”provide the Boys — now grown, thirtysomething men — with a distinctive musical persona, outside that of an aging teen act. These frothy, synth-laden love songs — co-written and produced by a predictable posse of studio professionals, from old collaborator Max Martin to the now-ubiquitous Ryan Tedder — are basically ghosts of singles past, updated with some contemporary flourishes.”

The Backstreet Boys hit superstardom in the 1990′s, with hits like “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”, off of 1997′s Backstreet’s Back, and ”I Want It That Way,” off of 1999′s Millennium. The group took a break after 2000′s hit album Black & Blue, and reunited in 2005 to release Never Gone, which drove BSB fans wild with the hit single, “Incomplete.”

After a successful comeback tour, band member and co-founder Kevin Richardson, decided to leave the group in 2006 to start a family. That left his cousin and co-founder Brian Littrell, as well as AJ McLean, Howie Dorough, and Nick Carter to keep the band going. They did so with 2007′s Unbreakable, which, much like This Is Us, was an attempt to re-ignite a flame that burned in a much-different musical era.

The new album features only the four members.

Still, the Grammy Award nominated band enjoys bringing back that 90′s pop sound, and infusing it with more current approaches.

“We made a conscious effort to go back to being ourselves,” says Littrell on the band’s website. “It’s important for the fans to remember what was, but it’s also important for them to know where we’re headed.”

Nick Carter says, “We always want to top our past albums. That’s always our objective, to create an album where every song could be a single.”

While the chances of This Is Us topping the massive success of the Boys’ early albums is unlikely, perhaps USA Today’s Gardner says it best: “If you’re a band that’s nearly a decade past your commercial heyday, it takes either considerable courage or enormous hubris” to do what they’ve done.

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Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell A. J. McLean and Kevin Richardson reunite for the first time since former ‘Backstreet Boy’ Kevin Richardson left the band in 2006.

Richardson joined the rest of the band in Los Angeles at the Palladium in Hollywood on Sunday (November 23) for the last stop of their “Unbreakable” tour. He did not perform with the band during the “TRL” finale.

The boys told MTV News in October they weren’t so sure Richardson would return to the group after leaving in 2006. Still, they insisted that the door was always open for him to come back.

“In the beginning of the tour, we left a gap onstage where Kevin would be, and then it started closing up,” Carter told MTV News. “We love him to death. We have to move on. We have new goals and dreams.”

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Kevin Richardson has officially left the Backstreet Boys.

Brian Littrell told andPOP last month that the group was planning to go back into the studio at the end of this month to record their next record, which they will continue to do beginning this weekend without Richardson.

The band has no plans to replace Richardson, who has left to pursue other projects.

“It was a very tough decision for me but one that was necessary in order to move on with the next chapter of my life,” Richardson said a statement on the official Backstreet Boys web site.

The band posted a message of their own saying they will miss Richardson and wish him all of the best.

“The door will always be open for him to return to the Backstreet Boys. We wish him the all the best in his future endeavors,” they said.

Read more at andPOP. andPOP - POP Culture with Substance