Not many people know this, but I wrote a book a few years back called 1001 Ways To Improve Your Band Right Away. Rule 77 is "Burn all your Chicago records. However, like Dracula, Peter Cetera solo records must be rent with a wooden stake, or else they'll return to haunt you." Rule 915 says, "Fire your glockenspiel player," and Rule 136 says, "If Phil Collins is in your band, lose him like a sock in a dryer."

I'll have to chuck Rule 136 out the window for the book's second edition, because in the absence of Collins, Genesis has become exponentially worse. Calling All Stations (Atlantic) is a fungus encrusted pillar of misery. It is an excruciating mix of the bland and the bombastic, a masterpiece of torturous boredom and idiocy. Imagine the sheer drudgery of Yes coupled with the gag-inducing sappiness of REO Speedwagon and Journey, and eliminate any sense of fun, however forced, that existed on Genesis albums fronted by Collins. Apparently, Genesis actually needs the likeable but hopelessly square chap, a man whose solo albums cause leprosy and pedophilia in laboratory mice. Calling All Stations is so bad, not even retarded kids will like it.

Genesis (Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and fourth-rate-Bryan-Adams-rip-off vocalist Ray Wilson) decided it would be good to put two eight-minute songs and two nine-minute songs on their record. That's like a small child deciding it would be lots of fun to tie a plastic bag over his head. They (mostly Rutherford and Banks) also thought it keen to write morbidly cliched lyrics, the stuff of fifth grade love poems and illiterate teenage suicide notes. I apologize to all the starry-eyed fifth graders and inarticulate self-made high school martyrs who are insulted by that comparison. In "Congo," an unabashed festival of ennui, Wilson sings, "Into my heart you came/And gave a whole new meaning to my life/Into my world you brought a light/I thought it would never go out."

An hour in testicle clamps lined with broken glass and cow mucus is a more benevolent punishment than pondering Genesis lyrics. Getting caught singing these hopelessly banal mantras would be more embarrassing than pissing your pants in front of your second grade classmates. I saw a kid do that once, and he just moaned with shame and the helpless sensation of not being able to hold it in as urine ran down his trouser legs onto the floor beneath his desk. His cry was a call for help from someone who already knows he's gone over the edge, an incomprehensible yawn of release, impending chaos and the dread of permanent, imminent shame. When I began listening to Calling All Stations, I moaned in exactly the same way.

This is the perfect opportunity to announce the grand opening of the Oculus Hall of Lame, designed to dishonor artists who perform at unheard-of levels of flabbergasting crappiness, those who have earned a Cringe Factor of 10. The Hall itself is in Paramus, NJ, the place where Bob Dylan once took a whiz, in the dilapidated bathroom of an abandoned diner, appropriately endowed with E. coli bacteria, salmonella and the sinking feeling that Jimmy Hoffa is watching you. Inside the festering Hall, on placards fashioned from the hardened pus of third-stage syphilitics, will be the names of member artists. Beneath each name will be a pile of dung. The size of each pile will be in proportion to the level of awfulness an artist has achieved during his or her career. As curator of the Hall, I will add or remove dung from piles when necessary. Admission is one peppermint Tic Tac. Don't laugh, Billy Joel, you're next.

Calling All Stations cringe factor: 10, because if it were any worse I'd either have seizures or develop Tourette's syndrome, and my health insurance doesn't cover Genesis albums.