When a band gets to album number ten, there’s little they have left to prove. This is very much the case for Bowling For Soup. Their infantile nature and infectious pop punk ditties have kept them going strong since the mid nineties (hell, they were making dick jokes before Blink ever did) and despite piling on the years and the pounds, their fanbase has remained loyal and their popularity has never really waned.
That being said, ‘Sorry For Partyin” is a fine return to form for a band that despite pulling the same tricks for over a decade, still has some mileage in them. Opener ‘A Really Cool Dance Song’ is an irreverent, yet entirely relevant poke at the changing fads of the music scene, and displays perfectly what these guys have always set out to do – play a brand of music that’s fun, lyrically witty and razor-sharp and ultimately puts a big fat fucking smile all over your face. From the gloriously optimistic ‘Only Young’ to the band’s own ode to drinking, ‘Hooray For Beer’, they do just that.
Jaret’s voice is stronger than ever on ‘Sorry For Partyin’ and despite some obvious over-use of autotune, every song is distinctly Bowling For Soup. That’s the thing that makes these guys so special and is probably the secret to their longevity – despite having been writing, recording, touring (and partying) for over a decade, every song they write is distinctively Bowling For Soup. They may have built themselves around a standard pop-punk formula but there is still no other band you can mistake them for. I mean come on, who else could write a song like ‘My Wena’ and get away with it?
Long live Bowling For Soup. ‘Sorry For Partyin’ they may be, but as long as they keep writing records like this, they needn’t apologise.
Andy R