Favorite Albums: 2000-2004
9. Sugar Ray, Sugar Ray
Original position on my Stylus ballot: #14
When a band drops a self-titled album after their commercial breakthrough, it usually means either they’ve stopped giving a fuck or their fanbase is about to. In this case, it was clearly - tragically - the latter, because Sugar Ray seriously gave a fuck on this album. Such a glorious fuck. Having gone from an album of fart metal to an album of fart metal with a fluke pop hit to a messy grab-bag with a few tight hits, they decided to commit themselves to an entire album of diverse, gorgeous potential summer glory. They’d lucked into radio immortality - could they pull off the classic alterna-pop album? Their handlers probably thought the previous year’s Cale/Eno cover was a red flag, but the real problem was that they’d become too soft for the children who still dug gratuitous record scratches, while older fans were preparing for the intensifying Coldplay/Nickelback schism.
Plenty of tracks still get recurrent rotation on my internal radio, though, with “When It’s Over” followed by technicolor Weezer-182 jams “Answer The Phone,” “Waiting” and “Satellites,” as well as the country-disco oddity “Just A Little.” They should have named the album Stay Tonight - a phrase that appears on both the KROQ daydream “Under The Sun” (“I remember Culture Club, The Clash and Men Without Hats”) and the Stonesy closer “Disasterpiece” - as it nicely sums up the depth of Mark McGrath’s romantic yearning. Though later CDs were given names like Music For Cougars and made to look like nacho bowls, they never put this much work into the songs again. And who could blame them? Did you see Nitsuh’s charts?
