Sugar Ray: In The Pursuit Of Leisure : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Sugar Ray are a synthesis of everything that's dumb about pop music; like Prell shampoo, they make you feel bouncy, resilient and full of pep. In the Pursuit of Leisure, their fifth album, is extremely infectious, thick with irony and inexplicably goofy. One interlude features a Monty Python-like skit, with a punch line from a live Led Zeppelin album, for no apparent reason. This bit of audio burlesque leads into the single "Mr. Bartender (It's So Easy)," which erupts with the crunch chords of Sweet's "Love is Like Oxygen," then becomes a metal-pop song with a gratuitously silly rap chorus. Singer Mark McGrath spends much of the album gruffly channeling the spirit of Fabian and other Fifties hunks who sang about true love, while the band adds strutting Southern-rock riffs to "In Through the Doggie Door" and fake Hawaiian guitars -- or are those fake ukuleles? -- to "Heaven." Sugar Ray don't pay homage to any particular artist or musical genre but to pop radio itself. And like a high school drama troupe in overdrive, they ham it up: Their guitar riffs are the musical equivalent of gorilla suits, and their turntablism is like a pie in the face. Oy vey!

PAT BLASHILL
(From RS 924, June 12, 2003)