Music for Cougars By Sugar Ray

It’s been six years since we heard any of the laid-back rock Sugar Ray became famous for, and it seems that in the prolonged break nothing much has changed. They’re still producing feel-good tunes that belong at the poolside during your summer holiday. The unfortunate thing is that their new album, “Music For Cougars,” while being vaguely cute in its theme, gives listeners little in the way of substantial music to get their teeth into.

The record starts out with an ode to women and everything about them that men admire every day. “Girls Were Made To Love” is a cutesy, reggae-based love song (We think it still classifies as a love song, even if it is dedicated to all women everywhere).

This then segues into the first single from the album, “Boardwalk,” a song about summer holiday flings. With Sugar Ray’s usual descriptiveness, you can just picture bleached blond vocalist Mark McGrath cruising the beach boardwalk for his holiday fling, making this a great tune lyrically, but musically there’s no hook or catchy chorus for fans to sing along to which unfortunately relegates it to a background single instead of a fan favorite.

“She’s Got The (Woo-Hoo)” is definitely one of the better tracks on the record – it has a beat fans can get up and dance to and is a sexy summer tune that people will remember.

“Love Is the Answer” is turned into a peace-and-love rally with a loudspeaker section, as if Sugar Ray were addressing a rally for peace around the world. The next track, “Rainbow” has a similar message about making it through hard times for love and happiness to eventually win out. With this song, however, the album gets taken back to well-intentioned background music.

“Closer,” “When We Were Young,” “Love 101,” and “Morning Sun” are all cute, light rock songs, perfectly-sized and served up at three and a half minutes and full of messages of love and happiness – perfect music to take a nap to at the pool in the last days of summer.

Fans will be glad that being on a recording break for six years has put Sugar Ray in such a good mood, and might appreciate the feeling of the tunes, but maybe next time around they could give everyone something more substantial than 40 minutes of the same smiley sentiment repeated 12 times.