Anyone who reviews almost any entertainment medium tries hard to live by that first rule we're all taught: "Never judge a book by its cover." Countless artists, movies and (indeed) even books have been the benefactor of this age-old advice. However, when an album titled Ride by a band with the name "Pu$$y-Cow" lands in your review pile, even the open-mind scholar in you cringes for a moment with apprehension.

Upon first listen, the band isn't as bad as I could have feared. The snotty 15-year-olds using a relentless barrage of curse words with no impact is nowhere to be found on this album. The album still contains plenty of lowbrow humor, with topics ranging from ex-girlfriends ("The Same"), incest ("Kick Your Sister in the Chin") and celebrating early 1990s hip hop ("Me & Ice-T"). The upswing is that Pu$$Y-Cow manages to play it all with a decent range of pop-punk ("Baby I'll Be Your Stalker") to skatepunk ("Tweaker Dave"), allowing to have the music support the content and not just rely on the humor of the songs to support 13 tracks with identical (or highly similar) music.

The bad side is the low replay value I see an album like this having. While it's not unbearable to listen to, it simply doesn't have a single song that really begs to be put on a second time. The tracks are all fairly short, but by the end of them you've probably gotten all the laughs out of them that you can and nothing else about the music really stands out as needing to be repeated (with the possible exception of "Taco Chariot," which does have a pretty rocking chorus).

The best way to describe Ride is, if you were hanging out at a friend's house and they put this on, you probably wouldn't say anything about it. This is in part due to the fact that it isn't so objectionable or bad that you would ask them to turn it off. However, it's also because you wouldn't consider asking him about the album or the band that made it.