Picture me in Hell. I didn’t believe in God, and whaddaya know, the guy’s for real. He really is an old bearded white cat in a flowing robe and sandals with a hippie son who has holes in his hands and feet you could drop a quarter through. He's a vindictive sumbitch, too. He remembers all the times I took his name in vain, the plastic pelican I stole from someone’s front porch and the three times I had anal sex. So I’m in Hell.

The devil isn’t some red dude with a pitchfork, though. Naw, it’s Liberace, and he’s force feeding me Twinkies stuffed with dead birds’ turds and the rabies foam from a gang of crazed daschunds. He’s playing an endless loop of Webster and Full House reruns on a big screen television, laughing in a prissy, maniacal titter, and slapping me silly with a dead, rancid salmon. I’m wearing a permanent body suit of live cockroaches, and all I can hear is Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s King Biscuit Flower Hour, two CDs of it, no less.

Until hearing ELP live, I have never drooled out of sheer boredom. If you doubt me, listen to the most annoying "Peter Gunn Theme" ever, the bloody plink-plink of ‘70s synths wanking away forever. If that weren’t enough, two songs on the first disc are called "Piano Improvisation," one is ominously titled "Drum Solo," and the risk of an interminable solo turn by any one of the trio (Carl Palmer, Greg Lake and Keith Emerson) is permanently imminent. "Pirates" is a healthy 13 minutes and 28 seconds long, and it’s no fucking comfort that the liner notes tell us Emerson Lake and Palmer actually researched pirate history to write the lyrics. Unfortunately, ELP skimmed over the bits about swashbuckling, pillaging, raping, killing, etc., and concentrated on the tedious months at sea and scurvy. "The Enemy God" is mercifully short at 2:40, but the thing sounds like a cross between porno music and a bad science fiction theme. The whole set is as sterile as a monk who had a vasectomy and then, just to be sure, castrated himself and flung the offending member into the fiery maw of a volcano, along with a sacrificial virgin. By the unbearable "Fanfare For The Common Man," I myself was rendered impotent for an entire month. And that’s just the first disc.

The second includes a 34-plus-minute live wank-off that includes yet another tedious, pro forma Palmer drum solo. He hits his gong a lot, if you’re into that sort of thing, and no, it’s not OK if you are. Then – guess what! – another drum solo, a piano solo, and synths that sound sort of like trumpets but really don’t because it’s the ‘70s and synthesizers still really suck. At their worst, the damn things reproduce the sound effect a five-year-old boy makes when he’s peeing really hard, imagining that’s the sound his pee should make, were his pee stream a Star Wars light saber.

The highlight of the second disc is the CD-ROM video interviews with band members, because you can’t hear the music so much. Listeners are treated to Palmer talking about his drum solos and Keith Emerson saying, in all seriousness, "We’ve tried to keep it all very simple, not overdo it." The story about some Teamster roadies stealing Palmer’s bass drum head would be boring, were I not cheering on the plucky blokes (They would have stolen all the drums, of course, but they had to go on break). The videos would have been far more entertaining, however, had they shown the horrible deaths of Emerson, Lake and Palmer individually, slowly, excruciatingly. Emerson dismembered by a drunk gorilla with a butter knife; Lake suffocated by stuffing Pla-Doh in every known orifice; Palmer pulverized slowly with his own drum sticks, by two seven-foot lab rats recently injected with a mixture of Prozac, Hi-C and a droplet of sweat from the left butt cheek of a leprous bed wetter.

Cringe Factor: 9, and a secure place in the Oculus Hall of Lame. Damn you, Liberace.

Why am I listening to Kat Marco’s Maiden Voyage (Rockat Records), when I could be out drilling holes in my front teeth?

Somewhere, there is a well filled with the fossilizing bones of Lita Ford and Ann and Nancy Wilson wannabes, and Marco’s are on the bottom. The horrifically cheesy metal-lite accompaniment would be enough to qualify this three-song stinker for eternal damnation, but Marco’s shrill wail, constantly and ludicrously off-key, makes the band sound like the friggin’ Beatles. If she were a real cat, the neighbors would be throwing shoes and clocks at her as she jabbered away on a cartoon fence, singing precious butt nuggets like, "I watch you sleep as you lay there/Your breath whispers in the night, ‘My Angel,’/And the moon casts its shadow on your face." Those aren’t the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard, but Marco sings them with outlandish histrionics, amplifying every heavy metal stereotype ten-fold. It sounds like an electronic yo-yo is lodged in her nether region, yo-ing up and down until the batteries run out. Somewhere, even White Lion and Warrant are laughing at this.

I searched the packaging for some sign that this was just a joke, that Marco’s rancid caterwauling was actually the music from a rejected Saturday Night Live sketch. But Marco left a little message for her fans, just to make sure they know she’s serious: "I now have become one with the music. It’s as though It breathes through my soul. The voice and guitar are merely vessels to unlock the raging passion within. It’s like being in a dream when I play my songs, the music searing from my Mortal Heart." That’s really much funnier than any description I could give this disc, befouled by one woman’s determination to precisely mimic the sound of 1,000 chihuahuas castrated simultaneously. Cringe Factor: 9.9. I stopped short of 10, because I think I’ve found a use for Maiden Voyage. At the appropriate volume, it pulverizes the testicles – just the testicles – of child molesters. No, strike that. Not even child molesters deserve this.

I hate to review Perverts On Parade, by Gordy Loo Featuring El Duce, in Cringe Factor. The music isn’t that bad, just raw, rather generic metal. But the late El Duce (aka Eldon Hoke, ex-Mentors), has staked out new ground in tastelessness, "Clitoctomy" is about a man who slices off his wife’s clitoris after he catches her cheating on him. And that’s as close as Perverts on Parade gets to a love song, unless you count "Senior Citizen Sodomizer," about butt-raping women who need colostomy bags. I’ll always be sorry Mother Teresa never got to hear lines like, "I’m gonna butt fuck your granny," and "This old bag, she was a griper, so I ripped off her fucking diaper." And Shakespeare’s kicking himself for not thinking up gems like, "Smell my anal vapor" ("The New Gordy Loo"), "Out of my ass comes a shit packed with corn" ("First Shit of the Morning"), and "Here’s what you need on your vagina – ‘bdbbdbbdbbbdbdbdbdb’ plus tax, bitch!"

Cringe Factor: 3. If it makes you laugh, retch, gasp in disgust, or all of the above, it can’t be all that bad.