with "Every Morning."
And here they come again, insisting that self-deprecating party bands never have to go away. Sugar Ray drifts further from the group's early aggro-pop sound; it's about girls and fun, cushy with melodies and McGrath's earthy, inconsistent vocals. Their laid-back attitude is infectiously unfussy: "That would make her ours," McGrath muses without rancor about a girl he unwittingly shared on "Ours." "Under the Sun" is unapologetically breezy and heartfelt nostalgia for the new-wave SoCal of the Eighties, and its earnestness pounds the Red Hot Chili Peppers' lugubrious "Under the Bridge" into the dirt.
Not quitters, nor are they fools: Although it's getting a trifle elderly to hear "Fly" endlessly reconfigured like the Rubik's Cube it turned out to be, that song is all over Sugar Ray - on "Stay On," featuring 311's Nick Hexum; on the shimmery "Just a Little," its descending chorus made for clapping along. The first single, "When It's Over," reprises the syncopated beat that made "Fly" so inextricable, without the idiosyncratic tinniness. And Sugar Ray are as uncynical as a band can be after three records and some critical drubbings: They even rawk, with a self-conscious whip of the hair toward the lipstick metal of their favorite era, on the closer, "Disasterpiece." Sugar Ray's influences run from sterling - the Clash, KRS-One (who made a cameo on 14:59) - to Day-Glo (those new-wave Australian bands), but they pull the sounds together with the glee of teens collecting cool stuff - shells, coins and half-empty beer bottles - from a baking Southside beach.
ARION BERGER
(RS 872 - July 5, 2001)
