The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers.

While it's unfair to directly compare Courtney's solo work with Hole's shifty discography, America's Sweetheart demonstrates a fairly monstrous decline in both quality and conviction.

As good as "Danger! High Voltage" is, the rest of this album is simply not worth it.

He stays in the background for most of God Did’s 18 tracks—but once in a while, he finally tiptoes out of his usual templates. It’s not enough to salvage a bogged-down album, but coming from him, even a little experimentation is surprising.

Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them.

Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility.

So maybe Pond really is just another ordinary-guy exemplar of the ongoing post-Coldplay adult contemporarization of indie, as his ordinary arrangements and ordinarier songs would attest.

Nothing here bears the strain of overzealous ambition, there are no flubbed notes, unseemly textures, unfortunate lyrical ideas; everything positive or negative about Breathing Statues is simply too ephemeral to make a fuss about.