The cover of Vue's self-titled debut full-length looks pretty damned nice. It's a simple black- and-white photo, featuring a dark-haired girl facing away from the camera, staring out onto an endless black-and-white beach. It's somber and cosmic, conjuring images of those freaky 1920's German expressionist silent films. It's subdued, restrained and, in a weird, bleak way, kind of beautiful.

Given all of this album's subliminal, smooth cover-art warm-up, it's a damn shame that Vue's music couldn't sound a little more like a silent film. However, after building up listeners' hopes for a cool, artsy album with their cool, artsy cover, Vue instead turn around and piss in everyone's eye by dishing out 11 tracks of smarmy, glitzy, flash-and-trash rock music. Sounding like a strange blend of soulless southern rock, lazy college rock and bad, bad late 70's glam-rock, Vue's music blends everything that is already wrong about rock music with their own even worse Euro-trash tendencies. This album gives rock music such a bad name that it makes me wonder if these silly fuckers might not be the indie rock Antichrists, sent here to destroy good rock music for us all.

After listening to the first few songs of the album, I little voice in my head started saying, "You've heard all of this before." "But," I replied to the voice, "if I had ever heard music this bad before in my life, I'm sure I would have remembered it." The voice spoke back, saying, "Ah, listen more closely, grasshopper." That's when it hit me. I had heard music this awful before, but I'd never heard so much awful stuff squeezed into such a tiny space-- so much concentrated shit making such a shamelessly terrible final product.

Mixing the irritating pretension of a Sonic Youth spoken word track with a grungier Mott the Hoople, Vue is so cluttered with nonsense that listening to it is an exercise in patience. The five-member band produces an amazingly empty and joyless sound. There's no fun or electricity whatsoever. The songs have all the thematic range of a 2 Live Crew album (sex, boys, weird chicks, boys and sex) and all the lyrical ingenuity of a Bon Jovi b-side. With this delicate mixture of musical crap and verbal crap firmly set, Vue manage to set new a standard for complete and utter sonic retardation. The result is music that's about as subtle as a flying mallet and half as much fun to listen to.

Taken separately, the pieces of this music suck just as much as the whole. Frontman Rex Shelverton, isn't so much singing as he is painfully over-emoting unconvincingly. Using irritating repetition and endless vocal effects to try and disguise his toneless whine, Rex screeches his way emotionlessly through the album's 41 long, long minutes. The most profound line Shelverton manages on the entire record is, "Try, try, try, try" from "We Were Here." Though, the three separate songs in which a chorus builds around slight variations of the line, "I want to see you undress," are nice, too. Apparently, Rex didn't think anyone would pay much attention to his lyrics, either.

Every track on Vue sounds identical to the last. Its opening track, "White Traffic," blows the band's wad early in the game, running through Vue's very small bag of tricks within the first 20 seconds of the record. So the rest of the album, on top of being lame, isn't even surprisingly lame-- it's just lame. You could listen to this unmanageable pile of crap backwards and it would make as much sense as if you played it straight through.

I firmly believe that there should be some sort of legal penalty for making an album this bad. We could say that it's slanderous against all rock music, then we could start dishing out some much-deserved ass-kicking. Maybe Sub Pop should have to pay us all punitive damages and Vue should be forced to be pick up trash along the highway. This just goes to prove my theory that if new bands were forced to take some sort of written test before we let them in the studio-- possible an essay exam-- we'd never have to worry about Cro-Magnons like this making an album this worthless again.

-Steven Byrd