It’s a Hit

by Ben Kweller

(ATO)

A pseudo country song that expresses its bland sentiment (“You’ve
got to set your sight on the Lord in your life/You’ve got to fight till
your dying day”) with some genuine enthusiasm; it even devotes its
first verse to a trucker, just to be completely shameless about it.
Makes me wonder what some actual Nashville dude (or nondude) might do
with it—probably a lot more.

by Empire of the Sun

(The Sleepy Jackson Pty Ltd.)

The music here contains unpleasant echoes of loads of mid-’80s
stuff: It sounds like what a stereo salesman would play to demonstrate
a system’s bitchin’ midrange between selections from Dire Straits,
Peter Gabriel, and the calmer works of Rush. But the vocal is what
really kills it for me: pinched on the verses and veering on the chorus
into a falsetto that might as well evaporate.

by Muse

(Warner Bros.)

I was tempted to review this by simply banging my head against the
keyboard and printing the results, but some explication is in order.
This is a Queen rip-off. Since Queen sucked to begin with, you might
expect someone retracing their steps to be worse, and you’d be right:
By the time the stacked harmonies and hollow guitar prance fully into
view, it’s like getting rained on by bad milk. Or, more simply:
qwwu8nnrtcd tyhlop;….uyd33v btg32d4c45.

by Kings of Leon

(RCA)

Speaking of horrible classic-rock redux, these bozos are long past
their initial Southern-Strokes strategy: Julian Casablancas’s blank
affect would make the “Don’t knock it, don’t knock it” refrain of this
majestic plod sound bored, but Caleb Followill just makes it sound
witless. Or maybe that’s just the way he grunts it out as if he were
waiting for the Ex-Lax to kick in already. Okay, fine—it’s
both.

“Baseball Sex”

by Lil Wayne ft. Mack Maine

(MP3)

Not all that new, but a convenient intersection of several
depressing trends of a bad year: the most pitiful-sounding Auto-Tune
yet setting off a once legitimately great rhymer who should have taken
a long vacation a while ago; stupid titular “metaphor”; guest
appearance by Mack Maine, the most needlessly ubiquitous figure since
Joe the Plumber if not Sarah Palin herself. Sure it’s a freebie
MP3-blog giveaway. It’s still a rip-off.

“OK, You’re Right”

by 50 Cent

(Shady/Aftermath)

Did you retire yet? Huh? Did you retire yet?