Music to sniff coke off left-wing supermodels to

August 19, 11:31 AMMusic ExaminerBen Westhoff

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Where the Ben & Jerry's at?!

Not since will.i.am's Songs About Girls have I heard an album as easy to hate as N.E.R.D.'s Seeing Sounds. Puketastic! This thing makes Trilla and Brooklyn's Don Diva look like Exile On Main Street.

Pharrell Williams is a rich, stylish L.A. dude who has almost certainly has snorted cocaine off of body parts of Adriana Lima. (Although I hear she draws the line at her upper thigh on the first date.) Why isn't that enough for him? Why does he have to try to convince us he has a soul?

Pitchfork's Ian Cohen put it well:

"Pharrell has never shied away from claims of helming some sort of polyglot musical mastermind, and free of their commercial burdens, N.E.R.D. should ostensibly document their unfettered genius. And then they release songs that chop it up with Good Charlotte, compare female asses to spaceships, and on lead single 'Everybody Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)', P lampoons partygoing cokeheads by sounding like Baha Men after five too many rails. If you're looking to soundtrack scenes of "Real World: Hollywood" housemates dry-fucking each other at Geisha House ("jump around like you're ADHD! ADHD!" goes "Anti-Matter"), Seeing Sounds might be worthy of regular rotation, but for the rest of us, it's just another baffling, obnoxious mess of 'serious fun' from a squad whose glory days are getting harder to remember."

Here's my take on the album, whose title references synesthesia, a super dope neurological condition that makes you confuse one sense with another:

"It's the musical equivalent of an ad campaign trying to appeal to the sorta-grown-and-totally-sexy Red Bull and BlackBerry generation. "It's gotta be passionate," you can almost hear Williams imagining. "And retro. And political. You know, some really effed-up crazy awesome stuff!" And so we get a song to bash Bush and mosh by ("Time for Some Action"), a track to snort coke off supermodels to ("Everybody Nose"), and a "thoughtful" Beatles-esque ballad ("Sooner or Later") to impress the tired, left-wing Victoria's Secret babe on the ride home. The group's moniker has never been more appropriate: Seeing Sounds is all technique, no soul. Every sampler-tweaked and computer-manipulated moment feels micromanaged."