Everything relevant about Bowling for Soup’s new album Sorry for Partyin’ can be gleaned by a cursory glance at the cover. The cover, which features the primary band members being flushed down a toilet, is an apt representation of the band’s thesis statement since they formed in 1999: “Haha — poop!”

While Bowling for Soup has never been a band known for musical variance, its newest album’s greatest flaw is its insistence on consistency. Beginning from track three, every song utilizes a formulaic combination of energetic repeated chords with explosive crescendos into choruses that innovate the refrains by yelling, usually about poop.

While the mediocrity of the songs would be simply boring, it’s the pounding obnoxiousness of the lyrics that detracts most from the album. The band’s attempts at “tongue-in-cheek” repeatedly sound closer to “penis-in-face” humor. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is “My Wena,” a song in which the lead singer talks about his girlfriend “Wena.” But wait, here’s what you missed: “Wena” sounds like “Wiener.”

Bowling for Soup makes the unfortunate presumption that penis and doodie jokes — a word that is actually used on the album, by 40-year-old men nonetheless — continue being funny over the course of 14 tracks. For example, the reasonably catchy “I Hate L.A.” interrupts its momentum two-thirds of the way through the song for the singer to launch into a vaudevillian segment so jarring in its lack of humor that it leaves the audience confused and probably crying.

This highlights another surprising problem with the album: a lack of brevity. With the exception of “I Don’t Wish You Were Dead Anymore,” every track on the album goes past the 3:30 mark, essentially recycling the same series of sounds over and over again. Ideas that become boring within the song become unbearable over the course of an entire album. Essentially, Bowling for Soup does not know when to stop.

What’s especially frustrating is Bowling for Soup is not a band without merit. The opening song “A Really Cool Dance” is a surprisingly competent jab at pop’s current emphasis on electronic elements. Once again, however, the band takes a significant portion explaining a joke apparent from the title. This includes a particularly mind-blowing last third of the song in which the singer states: “We are dancing/ This is awesome!/ We are dancing/ Dancing, dancing, dancing/ And we’re dancing, dancing, dancing/ Woo!”

Some might insist the album should be treated as fun for fun’s sake, but even this is a poor excuse — bands ranging from the Dead Kennedys to the Darkness have been able to combine crassness with intelligent songwriting.

In an age where great music from any time era is available, there’s no reason to invest in mediocrity. Bowling for Soup’s emphasis on hammering out an approach to music that they established six albums ago shows they’ve brought their skills of combining derivative punk pop melodies with potty humor to a finely tuned level, but it provides almost no reason to buy their album.

2 stars out of 5.