Jive
Pop, 2000

Yuck. There’s nothing blander than these Max Martin puppets, except maybe the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, but then again, they are all nothing but money-making machines for smirking fat music moguls anyway.

The only good songs here are Bye Bye Bye (a Michael Jackson-sounding ripoff) and the Richard Marx-penned This I Promise You. Everything else is an embarrassing, nondescript piece of synthetic tripe. Justin Timberlake, like his prototype Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys, sounds as fun as listening to rock getting blown to bits by dynamites.

Faux gangsta hip hop like Digital Get Down is embarrassing, and JC Chasez’s vocals, while commendable, gets lost under the boring, sonorous “down-down-ba-ba-boom” back beats that sound the same in every song. No Strings Attached, supposedly this group’s coming-of-age album, is as fun as surviving diarrhea.