Rick Springfield, 'Venus in Overdrive'

Backstory: For anyone who’s ever belted out a drunken “Jessie’s Girl” at karaoke, Rick Springfield is something of a living legend. He’s still mainly known for his ‘80s hits, but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to release new material, including this latest studio effort, his 15th.

Why you should care: Now 58, Springfield is a bit of an ageless wonder—he’s got the same chiseled features that made soap opera fans swoon over his Dr. Noah Drake character on “General Hospital,” and his voice still oozes the same boyish yearning that made “Jessie’s Girl” such an instant classic. And his influence on subsequent generations of power-pop pretty boys and emo rockers has been largely overlooked—although many of the earnestly noisy tracks on “Venus in Overdrive” try hard to connect the dots.

Verdict: The rhythm guitar hook on opening track “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” is flagrant self-plagiarism; it’s “Jessie’s Girl 2008,” with a weaker chorus. The rest of “Venus in Overdrive” tries to be more original, but the results are mixed at best. It’s a little weird to hear a guy in his 50s channeling Jimmy Eat World, as Springfield does on “I’ll Miss That Someday,” but let’s be fair: if you didn’t know it was Dr. Drake singing, you’d think it was just another slickly produced Warped Tour band. More problematic are overcooked rockers like the clumsily sexed-up title track and the truly awful “Warning Shots,” which invokes John Lennon’s assassination for some cheap shock value in the service of a bloated anthem about...well, it’s not clear, exactly.

X-Factor: Springfield returned to “General Hospital” in 2005 after a 23-year hiatus, at first reprising his role as Dr. Drake, then showing up last year as an ‘80s rock star named Eli Love—which gave him an excuse to play his new single.

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