Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Stink Rock Island - the aptly-titled new release by mediocre novelty rock group Flowers of Disgust - is indeed worse. Much worse. Worse even than their previous eight albums (and that's pretty damn awful!).

The Flowers of Disgust are the Carrot Tops of shit-jazz. They're a group of obnoxious kids whose annoying overconfidence will never make up for their extreme lack of talent, imagination, or originality. And with Stink Rock, the Flowers have proved (for the ninth time) that they also have no taste (not even bad taste, which could at least be interesting!). If their album provokes any laughter at all, we're certainly laughing at them, not with them. But, sadly, at least in this reporter's opinion, the FOD fail even to be accidentally funny.

Stink Rock opens with the instrumental The Stink Rock Island Suite, a grueling and poorly-recorded pots-and-pans; type of adolescent jam-session, which lasts about 25 minutes longer than it ought to. (Believe it or not, it's even worse than Baby of Love; - the infamously long and unrewarding opener from their Mr. Horse album).

And it's all just downhill from there. The other tracks, while somewhat more structured, are still just as uninteresting - certainly very far from anything that could be considered musically "cutting edge" (unless you consider a bunch of white kids in a second-rate garage band rapping to bad country/western lyrics with a chorus of pennywhistles and fart-noises "cutting edge" - I certainly don't).

Lyrically, this album exhibits the Flowers at their absolute most vapid, with such uninspired couplets as "I'm so lonely I could cry / And I'm so hungry I could fry / some eggs; nothin' goin' on" or the endlessly repetative call-and-response chant "She likes 'em big / She likes 'em dogs" (featuring an excruciating Edith Bunker esque male falsetto) from "Your Dog Is a Big Dog," a song which ends up sounding like a combination of a dog food commercial and a rap about bestiality (but, surprisingly, not in an interesting way at all!). Try as they might, the Flowers are completely impotent as far as "shock value" is concerned. Even the song "The Buffalo Winds Are Blowing, The Buffalo Winds Are Blowing" in which the Flowers not only shout "Kill your fucking in-laws and bake their heads!" but also state their support of subliminal messages in rock songs which encourage kids to commit suicide (pardon me while I yawn...), ends up sounding just as contrived as any bad stand-up comedy act. Listening to Stink Rock is like being stuck on an elevator to hell with Bob Saget, and he just keeps repeating the same old jokes over and over again. Perhaps occassionally the elevator lurches unexpectedly and we're forced to endure some pointlessly loud, almost pretentiously painful "noise."

Anyway, If you're looking to spend five dollars on something that stinks, I beg you, forget about Stink Rock and just buy a package of stink bombs - better to have a product that stinks gloriously and unapologetically than a lackluster collection of mildly revolting tunes that are certain to only make you more depressed about the loathsome malaise afflicting the current pop music scene. So let's boot Stink Rock Island off of our collective cultural "island" before its deadly and contagious stench infects us all! Stink Rock has no place in the modern world!