When I read the liner notes to Tim Hanford’s Blazing Rains (Sugar Free), I thought it must be some sort of joke. I must have been missing something. But as I reread the melancholy tripe, I realized the joke was on me for reading it more than once. It’s the who-cares story of Hanford’s time on tour with a band called Blazing Rains, told by one of the band members. When a guy writes, "I was having some problems with my girlfriend, but I wasn’t aware of their real dimensions at the time," "Even though we hadn’t been communicating that well, Tim’s departure left me feeling more and more separate from myself," and "My girlfriend had been trying to deal with our co-dependence for a long time, but I wasn’t able to comprehend its scope," it’s time to pull the plug on the jackass until he gets to a therapist. Those aren’t the worst bits—the whole story reads like that. I think you’re supposed to feel sorry for Hanford and the narrator, but I ended up hating everyone in the story, except maybe the girlfriend, because she gave the narrator so much grief.

Hanford’s music is almost as bad. He may be Bob Dylan’s bastard child, dropped on his head when Bob was so stoned he forgot he was carrying the baby. Hanford is accompanied only by guitar on a crappy home recording. He’s a bad guitarist, mediocre singer and uniformly awful songwriter, leaving not a wisp of value in any of the tunes. Most of it is meaningless drivel, the kind of worthless stuff one writes while on the verge of throwing up after an all-night bad beer swill, the half-formed bad ideas of a laconic, addled folkie. Cringe factor: six for the music, nine for the liner notes.

Hot Summer Nights (Moulin D’Or Recordings) by pianist Danny Wright is so far removed from the kind of music Oculus usually gets, I can only assume Satan sent it to us. It must have been for the time I put the dead bee in John McCarthy’s half-full soda can.

Wright appears to be the second coming of Barry Manilow’s younger third cousin. The photo on jacket also suggests he might be slightly retarded. Tepid piano instrumentals of milquetoast covers ("A Summer Place," "The Girl From Ipanema") lilt maddeningly, so close to muzak it hurts. Cringe factor: six. It would be a nine, but if the guy is trying to write stultifyingly bland mood music for anal retentive adult contemporary wankers, he succeeded.

If Attic of Love simply stuck to overwrought vocals and snooze-inducing alterna-metal stomps, Being You (Ocean Records) would be merely bad. But then, from the depths of cruddiness comes: FLUTE SOLO! Someone should have taken Ian Anderson’s flute and cracked it over his skull a long time ago, because Jethro Tull spawned a host of moron bands who think it sounds good in a rock context. Attic of Love’s lyrics aren’t all that bad, considering the source, but they sound so mawkish and idiotic in the hands of vocalist/flautist Andrew Tisbert. I’ve heard singers sound closer to Eddie Vedder, but I’ve never heard someone try so hard.

The key to realizing that Attic of Love is an unfettered crapfest without listening to the music is the bad moustache belonging to bassist Michael Sutfin. Is that dirt? An old come stain? Plastic surgery gone awry? A velcro strip to catch his snot? And that flute, that fucking flute . . . Cringe factor: eight, nine if Sutfin hasn’t shaved his stupid ’stache yet.

After listening to Pigmaster’s . . . For Boys and Girls, I cut off my schween and took a fatal mixture of alcohol and drugs in a desperate attempt to make it to the next evolutionary level. Unfortunately, I reached for the Flintstone vitamins instead of the barbiturates, and I’m stuck reviewing something so revolting that listening to it is equivalent to musical coprophagia. First, samples of horrible lyrics:

• "I wish that I was gay so I could have pride," "Harry Wants"
• "Call my baby up around quarter to eight/ Ha ha, she said, all you do is masturbate," "Al Beaman’s Still A Jew."
• "With a little bit of love and a whole lot of lube gonna get the mother fucking job done," "Barry’s Diner."

Each musical turd is sheer torture, the singer yelping like he’s caught in a testicle vice, the band flagellating every rock cliché they know, changing from one execrable rock or funk style to another on a dime, a really gigantic dime. Not to mention ethnic slurs. Maybe they aren’t serious, maybe they’re speaking in the voice of some racist "character" they know, but their lyrics are so convoluted, it’s impossible to tell. My guess is, these boys are just morons. The wildly off-key singer doesn’t know when to shut up, groaning, yawping and tra-la-la-ing (I’m not kidding. He actually tra-la-las.) over the ridiculously fetid music. The pain of listening to Pigmaster cannot be appreciated without actually hearing the damn thing, but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I’d have more fun drinking squirrel piss. Cringe factor: 9.9, but only because I need to leave room at the top of the scale, just in case...