Sorry For Partyin'

Punky power pop pranksters Bowling for Soup have made a career out of matching catchy, unusually well-crafted pop music with clever, humorous lyrics suggesting that the band was eternally stuck in high school. With 2009's Sorry for Partyin', the group, whose members are quickly nearing middle age, seems to be regressing even further, trading in frequent references to cheerleaders and jocks for an extended penis metaphor ("My Wena") and a paean to shirking all manner of responsibility, including cleaning up dog doo ("No Hablo Ingles"). Elsewhere, the group makes a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek bid for chart success with "A Really Cool Dance Song," which matches a throbbing Lady GaGa-esque beat and electronic squiggles with the group's usual sarcastic flair, and delivers one of the best celebrations of all things brewski-related since Tom T. Hall's "I Like Beer" with the even more enthusiastically named "Hooray for Beer." As was the case with "Much More Beautiful Person" and "When We Die" on the unit's previous release, The Great Burrito Extortion Case, however, Bowling for Soup occasionally dispense with the silliness to get reflective; "Me with No You" is a midtempo, acoustic-based, straight-up sensitive heartbreak song that could easily be covered by any number of teen-pop or Nashville country singers. Throughout, the band varies little from its proven musical formula of catchy, snap-tight, and energetic guitar rock, but the primary focus on this album, as always, is on having fun, and Sorry for Partyin' makes forgiveness easy. ~ Pemberton Roach, Rovi