How to Meet Girls

It only makes sense that a generation of middle-class white kids who (to make a broad generalization) often find their refuge from humanity in entertainment — whose psyches are saturated with sarcastic sitcom one-liners, celebrity gossip, and overexposure to niche marketing — would produce bands like Nerf Herder. Like their debut album of Weezer-esque post-grunge punk-pop, the band's sophomore effort How to Meet Girls is approximately half an hour's worth of the goofiness and smart-alecky cynicism you'd expect from aforementioned media-junkie types. It's all jokey and willfully disposable, of course, and while the band makes vaguely self-deprecating references to being sexually unappealing geeks, it's all taken to a ridiculous extreme, ensuring that nothing serious is ever really addressed. That isn't necessarily a bad thing — whoever said good music had to be serious? — but there are times when the onslaught of pop-culture references creates such a hermetically sealed world of music and TV that it's hard not to wonder what deeper issues these guys are covering up, with their dogged refusal to do anything that might smack of sincerity. Misgivings aside, anyone who enjoyed the first record will like How to Meet Girls a great deal; on the music-celebrity side, there are wicked odes to "Courtney" (Love) and "Jonathan" (Richman), as well as the humorously unlikely romantic scenario of "Pantera Fans in Love" and the frantic name-dropping of "For You." It isn't likely that anything here will score the instant novelty appeal of "Van Halen," but that isn't because it's any less solid or entertaining overall than Nerf Herder; it's essentially more of the same, and the important thing with music like this isn't whether the band has grown, but whether the songs are also of the same quality — and they are.