Hefty Fine

You would think that coming up with a set of 12 tracks ? nine songs and three interludes ? of self-consciously tasteless jokes would be easy, but the long wait between the Bloodhound Gang's third album, 2000's Hooray for Boobies, and their fifth, 2005's Hefty Fine, suggests that might not be the case. Five years is a long time between records for any band, but for a group that had a novelty hit single, as the Bloodhound Gang did in 2000 with "The Bad Touch," it's far too long, since the band will not only fade from popular consciousness, thereby losing all the fair-weather fans who brought them success, but they run the risk that their joke will no longer be funny to their hardcore audience. That's especially true of the Bloodhound Gang, since they've been peddling the same joke with no variation for a decade now, and they're beginning to show their age on Hefty Fine.