In a decade when so many successful new rock bands follow the Def Leppard school of releasing new albums at a snail's pace only to bemoan the fickleness of fans when nobody gives a damn about their sophomore effort three years later, you have to give props to Seven Mary Three for keeping their muse greased. |

True, they rode their 1995 debut American Standard and it's smash single "Cumbersome" into the ground, but they wasted little time in cranking out the follow-up that nobody gave a damn about, 1997's Rock Crown. And now, three years after their debut, the Florida band's got a third album -- Orange Ave. -- under its belt, and it's nearly as foreign to the "Cumbersome" days as U2's Pop was to Boy.

Granted, you won't find any experiments in electronica on Orange Ave., but you also won't find singer Jason Ross huffing and puffing over a fresh collection of heavy grunge riffs as played by a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band. Instead, Orange Ave. songs like "Over Your Shoulder," "Chasing You" and "Each Little Mystery" are all about crafty, introspective tunefulness. Wuss music, perhaps, to those who have moved on to Korn (or back to the first Pearl Jam record, for that matter), but a long stride toward reluctant respect from those who might have too-quickly dismissed 7M3 as another flash-in-the-pan Nineties alt-rock casualty.

"That [Eddie Vedder-screaming] shit doesn't sell anymore, you know?" laughs drummer Giti Khalsa. "That's the truth. We've got to move some records! I mean, you listen to Chumbawamba, the Hanson kids, Spice Girls -- it's all about the pop, man, and that's what we've got to do. Are you with me?"

"It's just maturity," explains guitarist Jason Pollock. "When you first start out and make a record, you've got that big bluster, that adrenaline flowing, and you're like, 'Fuck you!' But as you go on, the music begins to change if you're any good. And then, hopefully when you're thirty-five or forty, you'll be able to call yourself a musician."

"Hopefully," adds Khalsa, "we're still saying 'Fuck you,' but we're doing it by making our songs better. I mean, we've been trashed by so many magazines, including Rolling Stone, and we always said back then that we're going to prove everybody wrong because we're not going to go away, we're going to stay right here doing what we do. We wanted to be one of those bands that puts out a record every twelve to eighteen months. And I hope to God we get better at it. So I think the attitude that was inherent from the first songs we wrote is still there today, but Jason Ross doesn't need to scream to let his feelings be known, because we have an audience -- there are people listening.

"We made American Standard when we were fresh out of college," Khalsa continues, "and it represented that time. With Rock Crown, it was very much a response to going from playing bars and fraternities to getting a record deal to selling a million records in a year. And Orange Ave. is a response to the last few years and us being a little further away than at the beginning and being able to look back and go, 'Okay, I get it now.'"

And if Orange Ave. fails to harvest any widespread critical acclaim or massive sales (it debuted at No. 126 in mid-July and has since fallen from the Top 200), the band seems committed to stick to its guns.

"In the beginning, [criticism] hurts," admits Khalsa. "But at some point you have to decide what's important to you. You don't want to be jaded to the point where you don't appreciate when somebody says something nice about you, but you have to learn to distance yourself at the same time, so you're not living by what critics say about you. I think Rock Crown was a pretty good record, but commercially it didn't happen. Does that mean it was crap? No. We did the best for where we were at that point. And we did that with this record. And as long as we're able to look each other in the eye and say that, that's cool." (Richard Skanse)