Bowling For Soup – Sorry For Partyin’

The love-em-or-hate-em pop-punkers return and, as always, the question we have to ask is can they balance being entertaining with being ridiculous?

Things start off well with the extremely hefty and synth laden ‘Really Cool Dance Song’, the lyrics suggesting a level of reflectiveness previously unexplored, but it very soon becomes clear that possibly one of the most interesting sounding songs on the album is actually a parody. After a quick skip through the tracks reveals that there’s quite a lot of predictable pop-punk on board, this doesn’t bode well and suggests that self awareness isn’t part of the BFS game plan. Never mind, let’s look a bit closer and see if there’s anything less obvious going on.

We’ll skip past the embarrassingly childish ‘My Wena’ which we reviewed as a single elsewhere, and try not to get into the argument of whether or not ‘No Hablo Ingles’ is a veiled dig at migrant workers in the states. There are a few moments where they sound like they’ve dropped the nonsense for a moment and attempted to be earnest (Me With No You, America (Wake Up Amy), Love Goes Boom) but in doing so you realise that without their trademark humour there’s not really a great deal to set them apart from other bands in the genre. This is reinforced in ‘I Gotchoo’ which sounds like a carbon copy of Smash Mouth but minus the charm. The songs are perfectly competent but don’t seem to have enough depth for you to take them seriously.

It’s not as if BFS aren’t capable of writing genuinely funny songs with integrity – Punk Rock 101, for example – but it almost seems as if they’re spending half their time criticising everyone else, and the other half being a parody of themselves. Sorry For Partyin’ isn’t a bad album by any means, but it’s not going to convert anyone who isn’t already a fan. If you like the band I guarantee you’ll love the songs on offer here, but for me it just doesn’t do enough. If the strongest track on the album is one they wrote to imitate and make fun of other bands then maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.