Pop culture is obsessed with creating its own time capsules. Anthologies, multiple hour-long specials on VH-1 and MTV, special centerfolds in Rolling Stone and greatest hits albums inundate the already rapid-paced waters of commercial consumption. Listeners are left with an ever-growing mountain of information celebrating spaces of time, heartbreaks and bleary-eyed hangover mornings from which we haven't yet been able to recover, much less remember in a fully crowned collection. Therein lies the rub: How much time do we leave between the time in which these "milemarkers" occur and the time in which we actually dub them as such?

Collective Soul, one of the more ubiquitous bands to survive the turbulent transitions from grunge to alternative to modern rock, seems to have come up with an answer: seven years should do. In what some would call a surprising move from a band that remains relatively young in the larger scope of things, the band has given adoring fans (and their more or less lukewarm public in general) a greatest hits album, "7even Year Itch." The sticker on the album boldly proclaims that this collection will hit us with nine number-one hits and two new songs interspersed throughout the other 11 old favorites; unfortunately, the concept still seems a little hard to swallow. True, it's a new decade, and true, they've been around a little longer than, say, the Backstreet Boys. Still, for me, the problem that exists in reviewing this type of thing is inevitably still there-while the material on this collection is inarguably the best that this band has produced, spanning seven years and five albums, when compared to other bands of the same stock (Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.), it seems a tad ... well ... mediocre.

Ed Roland and company have succeeded in assembling a collection that plays to their various strengths: catchy guitar riffs, gravelly vocals, mildly moralistic lyrics and songwriting, which one could dare call formulaic despite the fact that it seems to hide under the angsty banner of "alternative" rock.

They've served us up old favorites like the anthemic "The World I Know," the sadly triumphant "Run" and powerful nuggets of the '90s like "December" and "Shine." The two new songs on this album, "Energy" and "Next Homecoming," smack most sorely of 1999's commercially successful "Dosage," a strange little amalgam of surefire soundtracky hits (think "Varsity Blues") and quirky emotion (think "Dawson's Creek").

In the end, they've left me torn. You can't really criticize them too much for their attempt: the dates on the album cover boldly proclaim that a rather considerable amount of time has passed since their first radio rumblings. On the other hand, these "greatest" hits don't quite stack up to their peers; and ultimately, they've just provided fans with a disc of consolidated convenience, a rather neatly packaged mix; and I can't decide if their ambitions are unjustified, or if I'm the one who's foolish for being left wanting more. You can't really break promises you haven't made, after all.