Sometimes, I don't know what the world has done to deserve bands like !!!. There's so much great music out there crying out desperately to be heard, and it beats me why stupid, gimmicky trash like this is even released, yet alone hyped tremendously by the indie publicity machine.

Let's start from the top though. Last year, !!! released a single called "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)", a dull piece of music without much at all going for it. For some reason, this was picked up by the public, and !!! became the new "in" band for a couple of weeks. Probably realising that the sudden fame from this single was the only way that the band were ever going to make it big, the band headed into the studio and churned out an album to capitalise and prolong their fifteen minutes of fame.

They shouldn't have bothered. "Louden Up Now" is such a lifeless jumble of beats, riffs, and inanity that it makes your average Spice Girls release look deep and sophisticated. There's nothing really on the album that you're not going to hear within the first two minutes of pressing play. When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Krazee, is pretty much representative of the rest of the album, with an amorphous structure, a few vaguely funky riffs thrown together in no particular order, and Nic Offer's awful voice, which sounds like a crackhead doing an impersonation of Joe Strummer.

If, for some reason, you decide to keep on listening, things get even worse. Shitscheissemerde is a pretty weak song that doesn't really deserve to appear once, let alone three times on the album. The lyrics are terrible too, like "What did George Bush say when he met Tony Blair? Shitsheissemerde!", being spat out in all seriousness. Various sundry references to weed are about as clever and subtle as being hit in the face with a cricket bat by an angry scouser. A shortened version of Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard is thrown in, and with the scissors taken to it, it actually manages to sound passable, which was a pleasant surprise.

Still, this record was even worse than I was bracing myself for, if that is possible. The band's name pretty much says everything about this album; full of style and attitude, but with absolutely no substance to back anything up. A really tiresome effort that brings nothing even remotely interesting to the table.