Many questions occur to me during the course of a day. Most of them are stupid, meaningless sorts of queries, mostly devoted to the idiot that failed to document his product and now wonders why no one uses his neo-baroque software as a development platform. But that's neither here nor there. Other questions involve the great truths of life. What is truth? What is justice? Why me? Those sorts of things. But today my only question: why did I buy this album?

Sometimes I'll just go larky on myself and pick something up for no real reason. It's a hit or miss, truth or dare relationship with the Furies that I must, on occasion, simply poke. When it works I find myself the proud owner of things like the soundtrack to Six String Samurai, the best damned soundtrack I've ever listened to and a singular reason not to ignore the surf-rock genre altogether. But sometimes it doesn't end so well. Sometimes I end up with Diffuser.

Now, if one were to believe the marketing tags of this Diffuser thing he might think that he was going to get a "edgy, crunchy guitar" sound with enough pop "hooks to call to mind Weezer at their finest." The object lesson in this case is "marketing professionals are evil, lying bastards, the shit of the scum-soaked earth with no place in a civil society other than the firing wall." Diffuser has as much in common with Weezer as I have in common with the late Mother Theresa. We're both nominally of the same species of mammal, but all other comparisons fall dreadfully close to stupid. Weezer took (or takes, depending on what that supposed new album is going to sound like) The Pixies' distort-o-rama of guitar noise, polished it up, attached a couple of pop hooks to it and went fishing in the mainstream. The effect was perilously close to perfect pop. Diffuser wouldn't know The Pixies if Frank Black sat on them, squeezing the icy air out of their boy-band-with-guitar lungs with the slow momentum of his ample girth.

Again, marketing professionals must die.

Legion, which is in fact an alternate name for the advertising industry as a whole, would also have you believe that this Diffuser thing is similar in nature to Blink 182. (They say this as if that's a good thing, yes.) Now, I own a Blink 182 album. They're stupid bubble-punk pop but they're catchy on a good day. But if we were to draw a diagram of the punk-to-pop continuum the Blink kiddies would be well into the "what's a Stooges" color spectrum. Placing this Diffuser thing on that spectrum at all seems to bend the boundaries of meaningful dialogue. It would be kind of like putting Creed or Matchbox 20 (no, I'm not changing the way I spell their name, and you can't make me) on that same spectrum. It would be a temptation to the Fates that even I'm not willing to risk. While I could probably survive Sid Vicious' emaciated junkie-corpse haunting me for the rest of my life, the idea of X-Ray Spex following me around and shrieking into my ear for eternity is more than I can stomach.

Still, I am hesitant to go full-fledged one-sponge on this thing called Diffuser. I mean something so truly bad as to warrant the one-sponge treatment is at least noteworthy. This Diffuser thing is not even that. It's just, um, well, it's radio-rock. Tailor-made, demographically targeted, well coifed lead singer with interminably bad middle school poetry lyrics radio-rock. If you're a 14-year-old girl who thinks O-Town is just too pretty, buy this album. If you're a 12-year-old boy who's looking for some "hard rock" to make mommy and daddy cringe as you head off to Jr. High, by all means, consume away on this puppy. If you're anyone else, conveniently forget that this band exists. You'll save yourself the "why do I have this CD" questioning period and, trust me, the rest of the world will catch up with your forgetfulness within the calendar year.