Somehow, last week, Hollywood Undead’s third album, “Notes From The Underground,” stormed the Billboard album charts and managed to briefly become the second most popular album in the U.S.

          Seriously, America? You let this happen? I might have accepted this back in the mid-2000s when the whole emo-rap thing was still in its prime and this sort of thing somehow passed as acceptable, but at the very least I thought we had moved on to otherterrible music trends. But no, apparently what we wanted last week was a teenage angst-ridden dose of white boy rap backed up by some distorted guitar riffs. Obviously the fact that this anachronism managed to get to the No. 2 position in the album charts means it was totally awesome, right?

          Well, as the first song began, I knew the situation was dire. Between the lyrics, which reeked of a 12-year-old trying to write something “edgy,” and the whiny emo vocals in the chorus and intro, I was well aware of exactly what I had gotten myself into. What would I do if you told me you hate me, Hollywood Undead? Presumably, I’d be really happy and then respond by telling you to write some better tracks. By the way, the “Does this smell like chloroform?” joke got old like three years ago, guys.

          The next few songs devolve into their usual confused messy mixture of rap, emo, metal and pop. The problem isn’t that they’re mixing genres, however. It’s that each element of that mixture is of a supremely bad quality. They’re bad rappers (Charlie Scene couldn’t change his flow to save his life), they have some of the most boring riffs I’ve heard in ages on their heavy tracks, they subscribe to every emo cliché imaginable and their pop comes off as third-rate and thrown in.

          It’s after this point that some of the more uniquely awful songs spring up. “Pig Skin” is the band’s attempt at simultaneously mocking club songs while cashing in on the genre, either way about two years too late for it to be relevant. Also, someone seriously needs to tell Charlie Scene that the way he constantly references different brands of booze in every single song doesn’t so much make him sound cool as it does make it sound like he has a drinking problem. This one really is laughably bad, though, so I recommend listening to it if only for the sheer spectacle of witnessing a musical car crash.

          Following this, we have “Kill Everyone” which is a terribly rapped, sung and played song that sounds uncomfortably like it’s supposed to be a school shooter anthem, featuring the lyric “Now let’s let the f***in’ gun break the silence/Close your eyelids/Another shot and then here come the sirens/I thought I told you to keep f***in’ quiet? /Somebody’s dyin’, so come say goodbye, kids.”

          “From The Underground,” meanwhile, legitimately sounds like it could be a One Direction track for the most part. Any pretension of edginess or grit is immediately lost as Danny wails and croons with his badly autotuned voice over keys and synthesized strings.

          The one vaguely enjoyable song on the album is the brainless party track “Up in Smoke,” which encourages the listener to “Get down like you just got out of rehab” and actually makes for a decent party track. However, a friend pointed out to me that the beat and some of the vocal melodies seem to blatantly rip off the song “Night Shift” by edIT (a much better song) so even this one is tainted.

          Overall, the most striking thing about this album is how the band has found new and unique ways to suck even more. Whoever thought throwing pop elements into their god-awful Linkin Park style emo-rap was sorely mistaken, and I think it’s been proven once and for all that Hollywood Undead needs a stake through the heart.

One Out of Five Stars

          Oh my God, guys, she’s finally back! Can you believe that it’s only been two years since her last record? It feels like it’s been like SO long. But the time has come and Ke$ha, one of the most innovative artists of our time, is back and better than ever! I just can’t express how talented and important Ke$ha is or how much thought was put into this record. I mean, to call her anything short of the voice of a generation would just be…

          Nope, I can’t do it, not even for the sake of satire. This album has defeated me, dear readers. Whatever hope for the musical taste of the general public Cee Lo’s recent christmas album had instilled in me has officially been taken out back and drowned in a pool of Ke$ha’s glittery Jack Daniels. As bad as Ke$ha’s debut album “Animal” may have been, “Warrior” is worse. Far, far worse.

          Now, originally, I could have been considered something of a Ke$ha apologist. I mean, sure, her music was stupid and vapid and brainless but it seemed almost as if it was so dumb that it was just parodying other dumb music. She seemed to, in some sense, be pop-against-pop, an idea which I found both amusing and intriguing. Also, “Tik Tok” is undeniably fun and enjoyable no matter how much of a music elitist I may be. So how did it come to this? How did her music sink so low as to no longer even be viable as a guilty pleasure?

          Starting things out on a sour note, the album begins with the title track “Warrior,” which fades in following a buzz of feedback. If this, combined with the poorly hidden autotune and nauseating synth tones which pervade the rest of the song, fail to give you a headache, you have a stronger head than me. For someone who claims to love partying so much, Ke$ha’s music would be one of the most effective means of torturing a person with a hangover.

          After that comes the currently inescapable and equally nauseating “Die Young.” I can’t deny that it’s catchy; it’ll probably be stuck in my head for the next three years but, my God, does this song suck. I don’t know what it is but whatever made her previous work lovably bad is completely gone, replaced with ample quantities of regular badness.

          Part of it could be that this track (and to some extent the album as a whole) just seem much more like stock pop music. Katy Perry could have released “Die Young” on a poor unsuspecting public just as easily. The references to glitter, dirt and partying now just seem like studio contrivances and any sense of uniqueness Ke$ha might have had is being milked dry.

          Unsurprisingly, the lyrics are also abysmally written. I know none of us expect pop lyrics to be Oscar Wilde-quality but why on earth do they have to be this mind-numbingly bad? (example: “Feeling like a saber-tooth tiger/sipping on a warm Budweiser”) Who told Ke$ha it was a good idea to try releasing a cheesy “Our differences make us special / let’s all just live in harmony” type song based on the rest of her career?

          On a side note, someone please get this woman a rhyming dictionary. It’s not that hard, Ke$ha, but I regret to inform you that “night” does not in fact rhyme with “side” and “eyes” does not in fact rhyme with “life.” Also, this is your second album, and as B.O.B. learned from the backlash after “Airplanes,” you can’t release a “I wish I could go back to when I wasn’t all rich and famous” song like “Wonderland” on your second album.

          While simply releasing a terrible follow-up album would have been bad enough, Ke$ha also has the gall to bring legitimately talented artists down with her. I kinda liked The Strokes and was not actively opposed to the Black Keys, but after they put their marks on “Only Wanna Dance With You” and “Wonderland” respectively, I’m pretty sure I’m morally obligated to despise them now.

          As if that weren’t bad enough, she even does a song with punk rock legend Iggy Pop in the form of “Dirty Love.” Aren’t you the dude who used to slice his chest with broken bottles on stage and hang out with Alice Cooper? What happened to you, man? Why are you doing songs with Ke$ha?!

          The bottom line is that any sense of so-bad-it’s-good that I got from the songs on her first album is completely missing from the music on this record. It’s repetitive, generic, contrived and bloody hell, is it bad. Perhaps one day if she does something surprising like a full-on rock album (as she seems to keep hinting), we might get something interesting from her again, but with this record, she hasn’t so much misstepped as she has fallen off of a cliff.


One Out of Five Stars

            Well, after the consumption of countless pumpkin pies, the taking of numerous naps and the putting off of vast quantities of schoolwork, it would appear that the Christmas season is finally upon us. Syracuse has had its first dusting of snow, you can’t swing a dead cat in either of our malls without hitting a Christmas decoration, and the ever-ubiquitous Christmas music is starting to be heard creeping out of store fronts all over the city.

            Now this may surprise you, dear reader, embittered music snob that I am, but I do have something of a soft spot for Christmas music. Although it becomes intolerable after a full month of having it blasted at you, Christmas music has a way of grabbing onto one’s sense of childhood nostalgia and throwing you headlong into some semblance of the Christmas spirit.

            Over the years, popular artists have attempted to jump on the Christmas music band wagon with varying degrees of success, or at least varying degrees of catastrophic failure.  A quick YouTube search can bring up pages of videos of pop stars and starlets trying their hand at assorted Christmas classics and failing miserably (and amusingly).

            This year, however, as occasionally happens, one artist has actually gone outside the norm and made something almost unheard of: a good Christmas album. I know, take a minute to let it sink in.  Yes, with his release of “Cee Lo’s Magic Moment,” the man who brought us “F*** You” may have just singlehandedly redeemed the Christmas album as a (semi-)viable or, at the very least, fun art form.

            One feature which shines through the album is that Cee Lo can actually sing. From the first verse of “What Christmas Means to Me,” it’s clear that this dude can belt Christmas tunes with the best of them and that you’re in for a good ride. It certainly says something about the current, rather deplorable state of popular music that something as simple as a singer actually having a decent voice instead of relying on autotune to keep you in something resembling a key would be a sign of merit, but this is where we are, folks.

            Track two is one of the best renditions of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” I’ve heard, featuring Christina Aguilera providing one of the better performances I’ve heard her serve up in recent memory. The song is sure to end up playing in stores in no time.

            From there on, it’s a mishmash of beloved Christmas classics along with some more obscure choices. The seemingly mandatory “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song” and “Silent Night” all make appearances; the latter in particular is fantastically performed, with Cee Lo’s powerful voice adding a nice gravity to the song without making it seem overly stuffy.

            Cee Lo also puts his stamp on Mariah Carey’s  hit “All I Want For Christmas is You,” and I’m not gonna lie, guys, it’s kinda awesome. I’m sure that last sentence will cost some serious snob points, but it’s fun, well-performed and Cee Lo does a great job of putting his stamp on it.

            The album has a few low points but considering some of the other things I’ve listened to in my time as a critic, even the lows on this practically sound like highs. Some of the lesser-known tracks like “This Christmas,” “Run Rudolph Run” and “Merry Christmas Baby” aren’t quite as grabbing as the more classic tunes which Cee Lo covers over the course of the record, and the collaborative song with the Muppets, “All I Need is Love,” falls flat, but the good on this album easily outweighs the bad.  So, this Christmas, knock back some eggnogs and be thankful that we finally have a quality Christmas album to break out, courtesy of Cee Lo Green.

Four out of Five Stars

           Within the realms of pop music, it’s extremely easy to just hate everything. Show me a top ten singles listing and, generally, I’ll be viewing ten artists that I hate offering songs I’d liken to irritable bowel syndrome. However, once one gets ever-so-slightly out of the Billboard Hot 100 into other musical avenues, things get somewhat more complicated. While there’s still lot of bad music when musicians are writing their own songs and there’s not quite as much label control, one can generally find more redeeming features than in a production-line, carbon-copy pop star like Justin Bieber. It is in this somewhat more unpredictable musical realm that we find ourselves with Muse’s most recent album, “The 2nd Law.”

           The album starts with a sleazy stoner rock riff echoing of Queens of The Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures, soon intermingled with orchestral strings. For the rest of the track (named “Supremacy”), the sleazy rock sound and rather pompous symphonic sound are combined masterfully, and it does a good job of showing off vocalist/guitarist Matthew Bellamy’s killer pipes. Very few people have a creepier falsetto  and it’s put to good use.

           Conversely, the second song, “Madness,” is quiet and soft, and is the first song to include one of the album’s more notable features, dubstep elements. While dubstep is one of my preferred whipping boys and I do still have that same visceral hatred towards it, I will say it is used tastefully here. It fits with the songs where it’s used and the fact that it’s used to evoke a variety of moods over the course of “The 2nd Law” is rather impressive.  I never thought I would say this, but Muse may have actually showed me that dubstep can have a valid place in music (providing it’s not the main style and is only occasionally used).

           Unfortunately, while “2nd Law” and I started out frolicking through flower-laden fields together and romantically sipping from the same milkshake, the magic was ruined when it suddenly smashed the broken bottle of boring-ness and U2 rip-offs across my unsuspecting face. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a thing, but around track eight, the album just decides it will stop being good for a while; it goes from being a long, dull take on Queen to an exact stylistic copy of every U2 song ever (“Explorers” and “Big Freeze,” respectively). The next song is equally boring, and while there’s an awesome heavy song I actually quite like (“Liquid State”), prior to the two-part eponymous closing track,the damage was already done.

           This, combined with the disappointingly anticlimactic title track that closes the album, left me feeling ambivalent about the album as a whole. It definitely has great parts and if it ended after the first seven songs, I probably would have given it a glowing review full of sunshine and rainbows, but to do so now feels disingenuous. Overall, I would still say the album has more good than bad in it and there’s a lot about it which I like, but a ten-minute stretch of badness and an unsatisfying ending mean a lot in a 43-minute album. Muse is a very good band, but in order to truly be great, they need to stop emulating other artists and embrace the unique sound which they so expertly wield over the album’s first half. That said, I can’t bring myself to hate an album which has a song as fun and silly as “Panic Station.” So I guess you get off this time, Muse… Just don’t push your luck.

           I’ve got to admit something to you, readers. I am not a teenage girl – a fact I’m sure will be surprising and distressing to many of you. As such, I may be doomed to never truly “get” what is so compelling and insightful about the music of Taylor Swift. The outspoken music snob I am, I’ve made jabs at Swift’s particular brand of cutesy country-pop. Such criticisms have often been met with some variation on the claim that while seemingly objectively mediocre, her songs are incredibly accurate depictions of what it’s like to be a teen girl.

           This is a hard point to argue with as a Y-chromosome-owning member of society. While there’s something to be said for specific music appealing to specific types of people, artists like Brokencyde and LMFAO have taught us there’s definitely objectively bad music. The real question is – with the release of her new album, “Red” – where does Swift fall on that spectrum?

           The album starts out benignly enough. When listening to the opening track, “State of Grace,” I could hardly register it as Taylor Swift, instead getting a strong Coldplay/U2 vibe. I was almost worried that Swift’s patented country/pop sound and lackluster lyricism, complete with dopey metaphors, wouldn’t be making an appearance.

           Luckily (although perhaps not for my sanity), with the second track “Red,” any chances of this immediately went away. “Losing him was blue like I’d never known/Missing him was dark grey all alone” sings Swift, simply overflowing with tween emotion. I’ve often heard people praise Swift for her earnest heartfelt lyrics, but my God, do they come out hammy. You really do get the sense that these are lyrics a 13-year-old girl wrote after her first break-up, which, considering Swift is 22, can add an unintended element of hilarity to her work.

           Track four, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” digs the grave even deeper for this album. While getting increasingly poppy would have been bad enough (and trust me, on this track, it is), my old nemesis, dubstep, also rears its ugly head, resulting in audible screaming on my part. I’m fairly certain that this current pop trend was created entirely to torment me as some part huge cosmic prank, but I digress.

           From that point forward, the album goes back and forth between regular, boring Taylor Swift and actively aggravating, horrible Taylor Swift. While there’s certainly a redeeming sense of sincerity to the tracks written solely by her, the co-written singles feel plastic and artificial enough to give the listener auditory whiplash.

           Aside from “I Knew You Were Trouble,” the songs “22” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (which were also co-written by Max Martin and Shellback) could easily have been performed by any other cutesy blond pop star and, like most of these paint-by-number pop hits, have the effect of feeling like you had a disgusting pink vat of cute poured all over you. I think I’m going to need a shower once this is over.

           That said, while I went in wholeheartedly expecting to hate every last track on the album, there were, in fact, some redeeming features. “State of Grace” is a nice enough song if you’re looking for something chill (in the general vicinity of Coldplay or other soft rockers), and the instrumentation (primarily made up of guitar, violin and banjo) ranges from being decent to actually quite good. Also, “Begin Again” is admittedly kind of a beautiful song. At least, I think so. After an hour of listening to this girl, the odds are pretty good that I’m just developing musical Stockholm syndrome.

           On the whole, while I wouldn’t call this a good album and it’s certainly not my kettle of fish, there’s far worse music out there. Small praise, perhaps, but probably the best Ms. Swift can expect from me. Cut out the moment of dubstep, take some writing classes and stop with the radio-baiting pop schlock, and then maybe we’ll talk.

Two out of Five Stars

             To be honest, until I got into reading and watching music reviews as a hobby, I had no idea who Flo Rida was. Oh, I’d certainly heard his songs, but he’d never made enough of an impression on me for me to remember his name. Other than being mildly irked that he had ruined the cheesily awesome “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive by using it as a sample in the appallingly bad “[You Spin My Head] Right Round,” I really couldn’t be bothered to have an opinion about the guy.

             Well that has changed, dear readers! As it stands, I currently have four opinions about Flo Rida, which are as follows: his sideburns are ridiculous, he’s terrible at rapping, he’s excellent at writing catchy choruses and he probably should have politely retired from music after releasing “Club Can’t Handle Me.”

             Despite my general distaste towards this kind of generic club schlock, something about “Club Can’t Handle Me” pulled at my cold, snobbish heart strings. Even I can’t decry a song that undeniably fun. His more recent work on his album “Wild Ones,” however, I most decidedly can.

             The album starts with the currently omnipresent “Whistle,” which I’m fairly certain even pop fans are sick of now. The chorus is catchy for sure, but while one could feasibly enjoy having a song like “Club Can’t Handle Me” stuck in their head for a spell, this one becomes gratingly irritating within seconds. Whoever’s bright idea it was to make whistling the new big fad in pop music needs to be thrown into the nearest Sarlacc pit before he can do any more damage.

             Being Flo Rida, this track is then followed by a mediocrely-rapped and instantly forgettable verse about partying and sex. The song after that is the title track “Wild Ones,” which starts out with Coldplay-like keys and (you guessed it!) an annoyingly catchy hook sung by guest artist Sia.

             This is then followed up by a mediocrely-rapped and instantly forgettable verse about partying and sex (wow, two for two; I’m impressed, guys!). If nothing else, I suppose one could praise Mr. Rida for his consistency, but personally, by about the third track of this formula I found myself nodding off and wishing I was listening to something more interesting like whale songs or an air conditioner.

             On the whole, while Flo Rida does have some very solid musical strengths, they’re all downplayed by how samey and boring his songs are. The production on his music is great, he seems to have enough clout to get a wide variety of guest artists and he can write one hell of an ear-worming chorus. Unfortunately, in order for any of those artistic advantages to have meaning, you also have to be interesting in some way. And the uncanny ability to sound exactly like everyone else on the radio just doesn’t cut it.


Two out of Five Stars

           Oh, Maroon 5, where, oh where, did you go wrong? I can still recall the days when this LA-based funk rock band was churning out adequately-performed, boring pop tunes which one could easily ignore and they’d simply float through their career, one mid-tempo love song at a time. Unfortunately for the general public, or at least unfortunately for music snobs like myself, the band seems to have taken a turn for the awful over the past few years with their two most recent releases, “Hands all Over” and  “Overexposed.”

           Until these two albums, the main adjective I’d use to describe the bulk of Maroon 5’s work is inoffensive. Their particular brand of bland, white-funk was the type of thing one would expect to hear on a TV medical drama or an adult contemporary station while randomly flipping through radio stations. Songs like “Harder to Breathe” and “This Love,” which originally garnered them success, share this trait and set the tone rather well for the type of music they’d be presenting until their shift for the worse.

           Maroon 5 didn’t really     have enough substance or personality to evoke either a particularly strong response either way. They were the musical equivalent of a stale, unsalted cracker. There wasn’t anything especially disgusting or offensive about their music, but there’s no real reason why one would have attempted to seek it out or get excited about it. This changed upon the release of the single “Moves Like Jagger.”

           With this vapid, poorly-written and despicably catchy piece of music, Maroon 5 was suddenly thrust back into the public consciousness. Somehow, a band that, for most of its career could have made The Fray look interesting and innovative, was being given a second chance at the limelight. A large part of this seems to be the fact that this particular track was not primarily written by the band, with the bulk of the work being done by industry songwriters Benjamin Levin and Shellback.

           Now while the music written by most of these mercenary songwriters could be compared unfavorably to being given a colonoscopy with a cactus, one cannot deny that it has a tendency to be catchy, and for whatever reason, it grabs the public consciousness. “Moves Like Jagger” did this for Maroon 5 and suddenly, love it or hate it, millions were at least aware of this song.

           Having used outside writers on “Moves Like Jagger“ with great success (if one can consider writing one of the worst songs of 2011 a success), the band continued this tradition on their follow-up album, “Overexposed.” The result was an even “poppier” album with less similarities to the band’s early albums. Between the studio auto-tune somehow making Adam Levine’s girlish falsetto sound even worse, and the injection of dubstep elements (which this critic has gone on record as saying is one of the worst things in modern music) into several of the songs, the band managed to make me despise a band that I hadn’t even liked in the first place.

           One of the worst offenders from this album is, of course, the currently inescapable “Payphone.” With its grating vocal melody, teenage emo lyrics and a lazy half-baked rap by Wiz Khalifa, this is by far the worst the band has ever been. It just goes to show that if you find yourself in a dull, mediocre band looking for a way to make it big, there’s one easy solution: become actively terrible.

One and a Half Stars out of Five

             I’m honestly not sure why I decided to do this. I’m inclined to say that no one in their right mind would willingly listen to an entire album by the artist which I’m bringing to you this week, but I did it.

            Not only did I listen to One Direction’s most recent album “Up All Night” in its entirety, I actually ended up listening to some of it twice. I’m fairly certain that according to certain state laws, this qualifies as a form of self-inflicted cruel and unusual punishment. But nonetheless, for your benefit, reader, I dove head first into the neon pink shark-infested waters of this infernal and now inescapable British boy band.

            One Direction has been getting increasingly popular in the states as of late through a great deal of online exposure, but they’ve been known in the UK since their debut on the British TV series “The X Factor” on which they were formed.

            The group came in third during the competition’s seventh season, and as a result, were signed to Syco records, allowing them to be released upon the unsuspecting world, including yours truly, who discovered them one fateful day a few weeks ago via one of those unskippable YouTube ads which I’m sure you’ve all grown to loath.

            In a lot of ways, One Direction’s music is something we’ve all heard before. The album starts off with the exceedingly Jonas Brothers-y “What Makes You Beautiful,” which does an excellent job of filling in all of the boxes for how to be a successful boy band. Only three chords for the entirety of the song? Check. Innocent and cutesy? Check. Aimed at a nonspecific love interest to serve as a stand-in for the listener? Check. Infuriatingly catchy? Checkola.

            The song’s writers (what, did you think that these guys wrote their own music or something? No, no, that’s for talented bands) certainly did a fantastic job of putting together a song that hits every single stereotypical songwriting tactic for appealing to the tween girl demographic.

            But while this may make the song marketable, it certainly doesn’t do a good job of making it vaguely tolerable to listen to. To be honest, the only idiosyncratic thing I noticed about this song is the fact that, in the video, nearly all of the members have really awful hair. If you’re going to be in a boy band, isn’t that the one thing you should at least get right? But I digress.

            The rest of the songs on the album similarly follow the standard boy band archetypes that anyone born in the ‘90s or earlier is probably familiar with. For example, you’ve got the “Oh no, I messed up and did something nonspecifically bad to you but I promise not to do it again” cliché (on that note, what did you do? Shoot her puppy? Photoshop her head onto a picture of Rick Ross? We want details!) in the form of the song “It’s Gotta Be You.”

            The rest of the track list includes several more generic tween love songs, “More Than This” (which is, lyrically, just a really bad version of “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers) and various others of equally lackluster quality.

            That said, the song which really puts this album over the top is probably “Tell Me a Lie.” Maybe it’s just my distaste for that particular dubstep-style synth setting popping up again, but the combination of the infuriatingly annoying vocals and the fact that it uncannily sounds like five guys doing a Katy Perry song with borrowed LMFAO synth made this the hardest song on the album to listen through all the way. And believe me, readers, that’s saying something.

            Being a boy band and all, we can pretty safely assume that given another year or two, we’ll have seen the last of this group until one of them ends up shooting a prostitute or caught in some Colombian drug smuggling ring or something. Until that day, we can just be thankful that we haven’t been dealing with them since 2010 like our friends across the pond have.

One out of Five Stars

            I’ve listened to a fair amount of bad music in my day, from fiercely mediocre skinny-jeaned metalcore to the omnipresent dubstep craze (which refuses to die) or even Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

            While I’ve managed to avoid hearing most of the talent-deficient acts the music industry offers up with discouraging frequency, one band seems to have made it their personal mission to torment me with their inexplicably popular brain-dead electronica, featuring some of the most irritatingly catchy synth riffs I’ve heard in my life. As you have probably surmised by this point, I’m talking about LMFAO.

            For the incredibly lucky among you who have never heard of LMFAO, they rose to their current level of popularity with the song “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011 and have maintained a vice-like grip on the Billboard Top 200 ever since. Normally, I’d be inclined to critique a more recent album, but given the fact that “Sorry for Party Rocking” still has two songs in the Billboard Hot 100 and given how astoundingly bad it is, I couldn't resist giving it a deserved thrashing.

            The album starts off with the track “Rock The Beat II,” which predominantly features one of the worst elements of the band, the cherry of annoyance on their sundae of atrociousness, if you will. That would be the shrieking, repetitive, horribly mixed synth.

            As a big fan of various gothic and industrial acts, I’m not always opposed to synth-based music, but the way LMFAO uses it just makes their already bad music even worse. The combination of stereotypical “wub wub wub” dubstep bits and the occasional extremely high-pitched synth lead gives one the uncanny sensation of being hit repeatedly in the head with a large blunt object. So if you don’t have a headache when you start listening to the album, expect to have one by the end.

            The intro track is followed by the three most widely known songs from the album: “Sorry for Party Rocking,” “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It.” It would be easy to discuss the vapid lyrics in these tracks (which seem like they were written by a high school student or some sort of troglodytic hermit whose only exposure to the outside world had been through watching recent MTV), but that would accomplish little.

            Given the proclivity of most pop acts to have bad lyrics, it would seem like beating a dead horse to dock too many points from LMFAO for this particular flaw. However, “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know it” provide great examples of what is arguably the band’s most insufferable problem: endless repetition.

            Both of these songs have a melody which is repeated over and over until they crawl under your skin and into your brain like those beetles from “The Mummy” and never leave. This problem is especially evident in “Sexy and I Know It” where the same melody is more or less repeated for the song’s entire three-minute and 15-second duration.

            Did these guys not know that “The Song That Never Ends” and “The Song That Gets on Everybody’s Nerves” were meant to be irritating? Even if these were solid melodies (P.S.: they aren’t) being repeated over and over, there is practically nothing which can be redundant without becoming annoying.

            While bad pop is more or less the norm nowadays and most of it can be ignored without much of an issue, certain albums are just so abrasively, mind-numbingly horrible that they manage to stand out. For any of you who, upon reading this, are considering subjecting yourself to this album the whole way through, I strongly urge you not to. It’s awful and I know it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go wash my brain out with a combination of bleach and the latest single from Massakren.

.5 Out of Five Stars

            Over the past few years, Eluveitie has become one of the most successful bands in the folk metal genre with their unique combination of Celtic folk music and Gothenburg-style melodic death metal. After becoming quite popular in the European metal scene, the Switzerland-based group is starting to break out in America, having already done two headlining tours in the U.S.

            That said, their last album, the 2010 release “Everything Remains (As It Never Was),” put their staying power in question. Many of the Gothenburg-style riffs felt recycled and familiar and while I enjoyed the album, certain songs made me think that the band might have slowly been running out of ideas. Luckily, with their new release “Helvetios,” Eluveitie has proven me wrong, at least for the most part.

            The album starts with a somber track featuring a spoken word section from a narrator, which introduces the concept of the album. While Eluveitie has revisited a fair number of themes over their career, this is their first concept album, dealing with the initial wars between the Romans and the Gauls.

            This leads into the first track, “Helvetios,” a proud and epic piece introducing the listeners to the Gallic people and getting the album’s energy up after a relatively slow opener. This song, along with others, showcases how stunningly well-executed the Celtic melodies are in Eluveitie’s songs.

            The instrumentals are great and the flutes and violins carry terrific emotion. The first track also establishes that the band is capable of going in different directions with their riffs, with many seeming almost reminiscent of metalcore bands like Killswitch Engage. While I’m generally very quick to call out metalcore as being watered-down pop metal, the core-ish riffs on this album work surprisingly well; they show that guitarists Ivo Henzi and Simeon Koch can in fact do more than recycle the same “At the Gates” style riffs over and over again.

            The next song, “Luxtos,” starts a precedent for this album of having sung choruses, which works extremely well from both an aesthetic and musical standpoint. It really gives the powerful feel of the whole Gallic army singing these songs about fighting off the Romans.

            Anna Murphy (female vocalist and hurdy-gurdy player) is put to great use on this album, providing lead vocals on the rather gothic metal track “A Rose for Epona” and supporting vocals on many of the other tracks. The band also seems to have recognized that Murphy has an awesome scream; she does it on two songs on this album (“Meet The Enemy” and “The Siege”) while in the past she’s only screamed in one song. This is a fantastic decision on Eluveitie’s part and I hope to hear her vocals used to such effect on future releases from the group.

            Despite how good this album is, there are a few minor weak points to consider. A few of the tracks (“Uxellodunon,” notably) feel like needless retreads of old musical ground. It’s encouraging to see that this isn’t true for the majority of the album, but it would be nice if they avoided it more thoroughly in later releases.

            Overall, this is probably the best album Eluveitie has done since 2008’s “Slania” and definitely a step in the right direction for the band. With songs like “Havoc,” “A Rose for Epona,” “The Siege” and “Meet the Enemy,” they’ve proven that they’re fully capable of adapting and evolving to avoid musical stagnation.

Four out of Five Stars