Does the world really need a duller, angstier version of Third Eye Blind? Black Lab are also from San Francisco and play similarly overwrought modern rock, but lack the hooks that made Third Eye Blind million-sellers. Add an unhealthy dose of gothy gloom and quasi-psychedelic flourish, and you've got Your Body Above Me-- 12 plodding, painful tracks, and not a decent melody in sight.

"Wash It Away" has been getting some radio airplay of late (it fits quite nicely between the latest shitslabs by Tonic and Love Spit Love), but it's only a matter of time until playlist programmers will actually listen to the song and say, "Wait a minute! This sucks! Why are we playing this?" The rest of Your Body Above Me is just as astonishingly bad. The only marginally good tracks, "Time Ago" and "Gates of the Country," sound like a reasonable facsimile of Toad the Wet Sprocket-- which isn't much of a compliment in my book. As for the, er, less appealing moments, "X-Ray" is what Achtung Baby would have sounded like had U2 been kidnapped and replaced with monkeys, and "All The Money In The World" features the worst David Bowie impression I've heard since that karaoke bar in San Antonio. Brooding, cheekboned frontman Paul Durham has obviously never sung a syllable in his life that he didn't overemote into oblivion. I'll take Stephan Jenkins and his lispy three-note vocal range any day.

-Nick Mirov