Fly Away

Sugar Ray's Floored and Music for Cougars

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Aug 18, 2009

Sugar Ray's gotten some grief for titling its latest effort Music for Cougars (Pulse), but someone's gotta show love for the ladies who were young enough not to know better during the group's late-'90s heyday. Give it up for Mark McGrath — he stirs the spring break spirit in bodies that haven't been on spring break in a decade. You can almost picture the singer, with fresh highlights and no shirt, consulting a statistician to find just the right ratio of Neil Diamond to Katy Perry for "Closer." (And a borrowed Nine Inch Nails title for extra credit.)

Collaborators and contributors seem to have been picked by the same method: "Girls Were Made to Love" crunches a corny old sample (written by the Everly Brothers and sung by the kid who played Huckleberry Finn) with a corny new drop-in (courtesy of white-boy reggae singer Collie Buddz); "Love Is the Answer" is a moldy Weezer track; and "Dance Like No One's Watchin'," featuring surf rocker Donavon Frankenreiter, embodies the ocean's unpredictability by not including "love" in the title phrase. (Never fear — it's the very next word.)

But "She's Got the (Woo-Hoo)" reserves the best moment for McGrath himself. "She's got the woo-hoo," he sings, "Do you know what I mean?" No? "She comes when she's ready/ She's sex and the city/ She'll bring you to your knees." Oh, that woo-hoo. Glad we're all adults here.

Of course, in this case, owning your maturity means admitting you're of the generation that pioneered the tramp stamp. If you were a Sugar Ray fan in 1997, you were definitely not mature, no matter what your driver's license claimed. More than 2 million people bought Floored, but only two songs made much of an impression: You might remember the island-inflected "Fly," which featured Super Cat, or the reprise which surgically excised the dancehall singer.

The rest of the record sounds like a different band — sometimes Filter, sometimes Limp Bizkit — and McGrath barreled through angry-boy thrash and n metal like "American Pig" and "High Anxiety" like he was trying to get through that phase ASAP and begin an assembly line of breezy girl-pleasers. It was a canny calculation; "Fly" caught more honeys than piss and vinegar ever did.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

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