Sugar Ray, Nate

I was at the beach about a month ago playing Settlers of Catan with my brother and sister-in-law, and I put on "How You Remind Me" as a joke. I had forgotten that my sister-in-law loves Nickleback and what was intended to be lighthearted irony became a semi-ernest jam session to the flotsam of our shared youth. We basked in the hooting balladry of Staind (it had, indeed, been a while). We went crazy and still called each other Superman. We behaved as babies because the Dolphins made us cry, and then we listened to the actual Dolphins' cry. The algorithm took us to "Someday," and in some ways, I have stayed there since. There are no coincidences in Record Club.

Anyone with a specific kind of perversion and an internet connection can tell you that Sugar Ray started as a metal band: definite shades of Jane's Addiction or Faith No More in there, but the weight was closer in heft to, say, Orgy, and the spirit was closer to, say, the more underage-appreciating parts of the hair-metal '80s. I can say this because I was there, as horrified as any eleven-year-old would be when they picked up the album on cassette entirely on the strength of "Fly" and then found shit like "RPM" (awful) and "Speed Home California" (actually pretty rad) waiting for me.

Turns out there was more of me than there were people who wanted to hear Warrant, because Sugar Ray basically turned into an adult-contemporary power-pop outfit after "Fly" took off, refining their horniess to something more in line with housewives getting their grooves back and revealing an almost shockingly adept set of pop songwriting instincts. They were still doing trip-hop beats on the self-titled, and still painting with a pretty broad brush. "Under the Sun" commits both these sins ("Ours," blessedly, only commits the first) and reveals what luddites might have always suspected of Sugar Ray—they are good-looking dilettantes willing and able to morph into whatever sells. Then again, "When It's Over"—the big honkin' single—remains legitimately good here in the waning days of Biden's Town, "Answer the Phone" sounds like someone with a Fountains of Wayne addiction blowing off some steam, "Waiting" is the kind of ballad that tiptoes a narrow path between over-emotive cheese and meaningless honking, and even the relatively rocking "Sorry Now" plays welcome as a stab at a kind of edge on an otherwise dull but precise instrument. 

At this point, Sugar Ray went for it on every song, and every track was produced as if it could have been the next big single, because it could have been. For all the parts that are shallow or embarrassing, the core truth is that these fuckers had it, at least for a while.