A time to fly

Sugar Ray stretch their last second

by Alex Pappademas

A year and a half down the road, Sugar Ray's first hit, "Fly," sounds almost too dumb to bash. That guitar that skanked along like a sports-bar poseur with a head full of Let's Dread(TM). Super Cat, phoning in his toasts and counting his guest-shot royalties. Frost-haired frontman Mark McGrath, crooning lyrics that were bullshit even by the slack standards of car-radio pop. "Everywhere I go, statues crumble for me/Who knows how long I've loved you . . . Twenty-five years old/My mother God rest her soul"? What does that even mean?

It didn't really matter, because "Fly" went down like a big friendly slug of Sunny Delight, the soundtrack for a super-cool summer or the cure for a cruel one. Combined with the shiny, happy, bikini-model-enhanced video directed by future Mase collaborator "McG," that pool-party-in-a-bubble vibe made the song's vaguely escapist chorus -- "I just wanna fly" -- seem almost redundant. The fact that the band's comparatively riddim-less follow-up single "RPM" stiffed proves it. Nobody was interested in a Sugar Ray song that didn't keep the party going, especially with Smashmouth, Puffy, Brandy, 'N Sync, and the Brian Setzer Orchestra waiting in the wings and armed with better soundtracks for that elusive funky good time.

On one level, "Every Morning" -- the first single off Sugar Ray's new 14:59 (Atlantic), named in spooked acknowledgment of the band's Warholian halflife -- is just "The Fly II," a prudent return to hummable folk in hip-hop drag. McGrath whines tunefully about a girlfriend who hassles and forgives, revisiting one of Orange County McPunk's most durable themes. But "Every Morning" is also about cycles of renewal, like the way pop music itself springs eternal, even when that means sloughing off yesterday's stars. "Said we couldn't do it/You know I wanna do it again," McGrath sings, but sadly, suggesting he knows the charts won't be anywhere near as forgiving as the girl who keeps taking him back. A "Fly"-style guitar fill, now sounding more like a traitorous question mark, keeps cropping up; then a beamed-in chorus of doo-wop "Whoa-oh-oh-oh" materializes to make it all okay again.

On the even-more-bubblegummy "Someday," the line " . . . when my life has passed me by" follows the title, and when McGrath sings, "I hear a song from another time/And fade away," he's probably thinking about a certain reggae-fied jingle that'll outlast his band. And as if that weren't enough, there's a Steve Miller cover -- not one of his early hits, but 1982's "Abracadabra," his last. This is a nervous, humbled band, aware that without popularity, pop stars don't really exist. So if they overdo it on the pre-emptive self-depreciation, it's because they're coming to terms with their own cultural mortality. From one of the bands who helped kill irony dead, ushering in the dumb-rock renaissance, that's pretty damn profound.

I liked the Dust-Brothers-versus-the-Archies vibe of "Every Morning" the first time, and I didn't mind it on "Someday," but "Even Though" (practically a "Someday" rewrite) is one ditty too many. And though McGrath finally has something to write about -- the possibility of not being famous anymore, and how it's got him shook -- he's still not exactly a writer. Most of the time, you can fill in his punch lines. "Someday" rhymes "take you there" with "without a care" and calls the ocean "the deep blue sea." "Falls Apart" goes from "run away" to "leavin' today" before further abusing alterna-rock's favorite adjective, "wasted."

But if you can get past this stuff and the occasional regression into meathead pseudo-hardcore -- "Aim for Me" wouldn't have sounded out of place on Floored, unfortunately -- there's evidence of real growth here. If nothing else, Sugar Ray have been listening to cooler records, and stealing better tricks. If you discount the wack lyrics, Pavement straight man Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg could have written "Falls Apart." "Personal Space Invader" jerks like punkified Devo or LA's late, lamented Charles Brown Superstar. "Live and Direct" could be the evil twin of "Fly," updating Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing" with scratches, a KRS-One cameo, and a dark, funky piano loop I swear is a Billy Joel bite. And they rock "Abracadabra" as if it were a song Fastball stole from Neil Diamond and Urge Overkill and they were stealin' it back.

Now that "Every Morning" is all over alternative radio, Sugar Ray are probably well on their way toward recapturing all those kids who channel-surfed after "Fly." The rest of 14:59 is sun-baked SoCal AOR for a post-Beck world, beat-conscious and bittersweet. Who knows -- maybe it'll even buy them another 15 minutes.