REVIEW: Sugar Ray, Lemonade and Brownies (Lava/Atlantic)

- Martin Bate

The cover is a soft-edged photo of a young, naked blonde girl on all-fours with her bottom pushed up in the air. Oh dear....

This is the debut album from Sugar Ray, an LA foursome with House of Pain's DJ Lethal helping out on production. A little surprisingly then, that their sound in the main is fashionable rock-punk with only a side-serve of rap and funk.

OK, lets get the bad bits out the way first. Too many songs here sound like the wave of ordinary funk-metal that swept in on the back of the success of Living Colour and the Chili Peppers a few years back. "Iron Mic" typifies the problem, sounding *exactly* like a white-boy rock band attempting a clumsy stab at funk - think a harder-edged Extreme circa their second album. This is then allied to a clumsy and patronizing attempt at social commentary - the fate of Mike Tyson in this case, although elsewhere the favoured topic seems to be childish sex stories - and topped of with a lumpen, wooden rap which proves once and for all that, like playing guitar, anyone *can* do it, but that you need a wealth of talent and skill to make it interesting. Then you've got the drive-in ordering skit which was old years ago and the cock-rock of "Caboose" which I can only hope is meant to be a joke.

So I hate this, right? Well, no. "Big Black Woman" is a cool two minute comic thrash-around, "Dance Party USA" has an admirably scuzzy riff, and "Mean Machine" is a dumb rock-and-roller worthy of The Supersuckers and guaranteed to have you flooring the gas pedal.

Then there's "Danzig Needs a Hug" (possibly song title of the year!) and "Scuzzboots", whose daft titles hide rare moments of sincerity, with the band's funk benefiting from the ham-fisted power-chords being replaced by some smooth DJ Lethal produced beats, the latter utilising the same ice-cool brooding backing as Compton's Most Wanted's "Hoodrat".

Throughout the whole album there's an energy and sense of fun that shines easily through the crisp production and suggests that they'd be a riot live. All in all, it's certainly a fair way to being a good, varied, dumb party album. And to be fair that's probably what they were aiming for all along.