But, duuuuuuuuuuuude. That was one hell of a Saturday night! (Now we should all get tested.)

That's right: The misunderstood visionaries behind such gems as "Get Stoned" and "Loaded and Alone" are back, and they're as sexually aggressive, schmaltzy, and -- this is the important part -- catchy as ever. Their latest slab of overproduced radio jams, All American Nightmare, may sound like it was mixed up in a lab somewhere out of three cans of pre-ban Four Loko and a hard drive chocked full of porn, but it's exactly as addictive as you'd imagine based on that description. It's probably the best Hinder record to date, as dubious a distinction as that may be.

The band's overarching themes haven't changed much. In the very first track, singer Austin Winkler is "gonna love you all night long while you're turning me on, until the love and the liquor's gone." One song later, he's got "three bunnies in the back of my Cadillac," and he's making "the good girls bad and bad girls blush." But don't worry, feminists; it's not until three quarters of the way through the record that he'd "respect you more if you just took off your clothes, yeah!"

And you know the worst thing about being a sex-addled rock star? How miserable it is, or at least that's the impression you'd get from the overblown power ballads All American Nightmare serves up. On "What Ya Gonna Do?" the band is looking in the mirror and wondering where it all went wrong; on "Everybody's Wrong" and "Red Tail Lights," Winkler sings about how unfair it is that his ex (one of those bunnies, no doubt) dumped him and now all her friends think it's his fault. Next to these three, "The Life" actually sounds like a mature and serious attempt to grapple with the contradictions of fame.

No one would confuse this with "good music" in any artistic or technical sense of the term, but you know what? It's hard to stop listening to All American Nightmare. It's all so perfect: The huge production, the pounding guitars, the mindlessly catchy melodies, the soaring choruses in the ballads. In its own bumbling, senseless way, it deserves to sell a bajillion copies. And it probably will.

-- Robert VerBruggen is a writer and editor who lives in New York. You can follow his work at http://www.google.com/profiles/robertv4311#buzz or http://www.twitter.com/raverbruggen.