The reviews have been fairly brutal. "The Backstreet men rarely accelerate beyond a midtempo thud," said Rolling Stone in a one-star assessment. "The result is not so much bad as sad. Everything good about the Backstreet Boys... is gone, replaced by the efforts of a large team of experts to mold them into something along the lines of Matchbox Twenty or Maroon 5," wrote Joan Anderman of The Boston Globe.

OK, so no one ever said it was easy to be in a once-mammoth boy band and take five years off to become men (i.e., have kids, date Paris Hilton, get arrested, get married, visit rehab, help save the environment) and now attempt a comeback.

That return, the album "Never Gone," might be getting savaged by critics - and, before you ask, yes, actually, many music pundits have given the five their props in the past - but the Backstreet Boys are the musical equivalent of the latest "Star Wars" films. The critics might be correct in pointing out the mediocrity, but that doesn't stop fans from being fans.

Exhibit A: "Never Gone" moved close to 300,000 copies its first week of release in June. Not quite the 1.6 million the Boys' last album, "Black & Blue," shipped in 2000, but enough to land it at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 album chart. The album is also No. 1 in several international markets.

Obviously, plenty of people still like them - also evidenced by an instantly sold-out club tour this spring.

But considering that Howie Dorough, Kevin Richardson, Brian Littrell, Nick Carter and A.J. McLean are now men, they're sensible enough to have approached this album with one thought: to make the music they wanted to make.

"When we were recording, our record company was not sure who our fan base was," said Richardson last month in a conference call. "Making the record, we never thought about any particular demo[graphic], but when we did our club tour, it kind of revealed our fan base."

Which was?

"We did see a lot of familiar faces that have gotten older, so we've obviously hung on to a lot of our fans. But we also noticed there were a lot of young kids out there who were probably only about 8 years old when we took our break."

Another sign of maturity within the group comes with the stage show for this summer outing, which launches Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla., and arrives at Nissan Pavilion in Manassas on Aug. 6. In the past, Backstreet Boys concerts were spectacles of pyro, costumes and synchronized dancing - partially to keep pace with then-rival 'N Sync. This go-around, says McLean, the Boy most proud of his sobriety, things will be simpler.

"There was that one big summer with us, and Ricky Martin and Britney [Spears] on tour and it was like, who can blow up the most stuff on stage," he said. "As we've gotten older, the music doesn't lend itself to the pryo and acrobatics. It's gotten back to basics. We do still dance, just not as much."

Indeed, the weakest point during the group's club tour was when band members fell into familiar step routines on a handful of songs - an attempt at nostalgia that looked slightly ridiculous for men in their late 20s and 30s (Richardson is the oldest at 33). And it's also valid that new songs such as the first hit ballad "Incomplete" and new midtempo single "Just Want You to Know" would benefit more from the quintet's harmonizing than blurry footwork.

Something else the Boys seem unusually attuned to is the pocketbooks of their fans. For the entire tour, all lawn seats will be a flat $20. It's a tactic many Clear Channel venues are attempting with several summer tours, but this is the only one conceived by the performing group itself.

More cynical types might consider that move one of desperation, but Dorough claims it is genuinely magnanimous.

"We wanted to do something special for our fans. We did a smaller tour earlier to reconnect with them, and we just had a great response. This is just something that we felt we want to give back to our fans. We want to make sure that we have a full house out there with all of our fans who really want to hear our music," he said.

With more than 73 million albums sold worldwide, two of them recipients of Billboard's prestigious Diamond award for sales of more than 10 million in the U.S. ("Millennium" with 12 million and "Backstreet Boys" with 13 million), the Backstreet Boys really have nothing to prove anymore. And it's almost hard to believe it's been 13 years since the group's career first crept out of its Orlando, Fla., base.

So why now for this reunion of sorts? Like all things, it was just a matter of timing, said the blond heartthrob of the group, Nick Carter, just sentenced to three months of alcohol rehab after pleading guilty to DUI in March.

"I guess there is no perfect time. It just took its course... I was over in London writing and recording and I got a call from Brian and he was saying that A.J. was doing a special on 'Oprah' about his addiction and sobriety, so we hopped a plane to surprise him," Carter said.

"The feeling was just there again. I find the fun is back and the adventure is back in it again. We're happy in our skin. When we all sat down in a room after 'Oprah,' we all said, 'OK, guys, if we're going to do this again, it's going to have to be 110 percent and, you know, everybody's going to have to work their butts off. And, you know, we've just had a lot of fun together over the years making music, and it's just exciting."

Apparently, that is enough for these guys, no matter what the critics have to say.