"Drive By" Train

Following the relentless cultural saturation of 2010's "Hey Soul Sister"—an irritatingly cheerful ukelele love song that Madison Avenue couldn't get enough of—Train became your mom's favorite band. Of course, it made everybody else hate the San Francisco rock outfit in the process, and "Drive By," the lead single from their upcoming sixth studio album, California 37, is probably not going to be changing any minds. It's another irritatingly cheerful acoustic love song from the same production team behind "Soul Sister," and here they attempt to repeat their formula to even more baffling effect. Should a song about trying to win back the lover you abandoned really have a sunny chorus that suggests the driving montage in a road trip movie? That hardly seems romantically appropriate. Neither do references to two-ply Hefty trash bags, love going viral and the old children's saying "So sue me!"—a lyrical playfulness not nearly as clever as Pat Monahan believes. C-