All right, no more scary business. Back to plain old monkey business this week.

The Good

This week I’m proud to say that the good is the new release from Lit. That’s right, the band we all expected to see five years from now on "Where are they Now?" has released an album worthy of praise.

The album, dubbed "Atomic," actually didn’t register on my radar until I saw it in the store, but with the extra cheap price tag that accompanied it, I decided that it would be a good purchase, and is it ever. Lit has really discovered their formula for success. This album is a testament to their brand of hook- laden power pop.

The first single, the blistering "Lipstick and Bruises" hits hard, but I’ll be willing to wager you’ll have just as much trouble extracting the chorus from your mind as I did. Of course, a catchy song must come packaged with a kitschy video. This one features a giant robot billed in the video info as "Mulletron." Three guesses what Mulletron does to hair in the video, and the results just ain’t pretty.

Lit has really expanded their sound on this album; the guitars are lower, the harmonies are tighter, and the song writing seems to have come a long way. In my opinion, the album could just as easily passed for a new release from sadly defunct Marvelous 3 (Butch Walker, the lead singer of Marv3 actually collaborated on the track "Sunny Weather") but you will not hear me complain about that. Some personal favorites include the intro track "Something to Someone," which manages to salvage itself despite a very slow start, "She Comes," which sounds like Lit by way of the Beatles, and "Over my Head," the song that actually made me enjoy "Titan A.E."

Unfortunately, the album does contain one major stumbling block for me (besides not having Butch Walker do backup vocals); and that is the addition of a string section to the ballad-esque "Slip." Have we learned nothing from Creed, guys? String sections, while I do enjoy them if employed properly, actually take away from songs if used poorly.

All in all, a highly recommended album, unless you despise having really good pop songs caught in your head for weeks at a time.

The Bad

The bad this week actually didn’t come straight from this week. It comes in the form of rap-metal suckfest Nullset, and it’s actually a holdover from this summer that I had forgotten all about until this week.

The self-titled album was released over the summer on Grand Royal Records, and is the first album by the band under the name Nullset; they had previously been called "Gangsta Bitch Barbie." The band tries their hardest to fill that aching void I feel in my heart for a band that sounds exactly like Limp Bizkit without all the substance that Bizkit brings to the table. Gangsta Bitch Barbie lacks substance? How can that be?

Let me put it this way—the disk is 42 minutes of Fred Durst sound-a-like singer Ken Smith reading directly from the rhyming dictionary and only barely managing to form his seemingly socio-political messages ("I’ve waited patiently/ now I wanna see/ who’s the victim/ in this system?") into verses and choruses that adhere to the overly repetitive sounds hammered to bits by the rest of the band.

I can still appreciate most acts by the effort they put into performing their music live, but I actually sat through a set by these crap-metal superstars this summer (I was waiting to see Shades Apart, who you should all listen to). The only "effort" I saw on the stages was the effort put forth by the front man to coerce the rapidly dissipating crowd to stick around until the end of the set.

All in all, yet another effortless and empty throw away rap metal album. However if you need something really loud and obnoxious to drown out pretty much everything, by all means, skip this one and pick up "Iowa" by Slipknot.