There are times when British rockers You Me At Six ascend on the sophomore album, Hold Me Down, but more often than not the pop-punkers get lost in the shuffle that is an overblown and overcrowded genre dominated by big name American bands and lacking in true originality. The genre itself was once the home to any number of breakout bands when insane bangs, skinny jeans, and emotion were the “in”; thing, but when bands like Fall Out Boy implode the rest of the genre can’t be far behind.

Hold Me Down is able to step up to the plate with great production values and an excellent sound with some radio-ready hooks that are sure to please those keen for the next release in a familiar territory, however aside from the first single, “The Consequence“; there just isn’t a lot to like here that hasn’t already been done (better) before. We’ve all heard the emotional tale of betrayal, lost love, and self-loathing before.

The clearly emo-laden disc comes off as a mish-mash of familiar beats, lyrics, and riffs. Even the cheeky track names like “There’s No Such Thing As Accidental Infidelity“; come off as a calling to other bands who make funnier, wittier statements with their irrelevant names. Still, even with the built in familiarity, musically the band excels and laying down excellent sounding tracks with the aforementioned production polish, ultimately you just wish there was something more to back it up.

NBC’s Parenthood is based on the 1989 film directed by Ron Howard, and aside from a large cast of characters who are all related in some easy-breezy way, the similarities with the movie seem to end. The series is a dramedy focusing on the Braverman clan and the trials which shaped their lives.

Where Parenthood really excels is its excellent casting much like ABC’s Modern Family, its all about the people behind these characters and how well they gel together. Anchoring the show are the beautiful Lauren Graham (Sarah Braverman), Peter Krause (Adam Braverman), and Braverman patriarch Zeek Braverman played by Craig T. Nelson who always shines.

The first hour provides a decent amount of laughs, mostly when Graham is in the room, and sets up a seasons worth of storylines with Sarah moving back in with her parents have a financial downturn, Adam dealing with the diagnosis of his son Max with Asperger’s. There are your typical sitcom moments, such as Sarah’s son catching her sexual escapades with a portly, balding former-classmate (Mike O’Malley) and your typical drama moments with long pauses and furrowed brows.

There’s definitely a lot to like here, and while the episode blows all of its comedic chops in the first 20 minutes, and loads up the final two acts with heavy drama, it’s still easy to see that the writers are mixing in a healthy balance of both. Ultimately the show needs time to grow into its own, but from what we’ve seen so far there are very capable people both behind and in-front of the camera and Parenthood can easily make its way into can’t miss territory with a few more episodes like the pilot.

Plain and simple FX’s new series Archer delivers the irreverent comedy that was experienced during the glory days of Warner’s adult swim. Not since the days of Sealab 2021 (another Adam Reed project) has a show come up with some of the most ridiculously funny and brilliantly absurd comedy as does Archer. Having seen the first five episodes of the series its no wonder why the network ordered more, aside from ABC’s Modern Family, Archer is the frontrunner for the best new comedy of the 2009-2010 season.

Sterling Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) is a secret agent for ISIS, a freelance spy agency run by his mother, Malory (the always funny Jessica Walter), and works with a cast of characters including his ex-flame Lana (Aisha Tyler), her new beau, and ISIS comptroller Cyril (Chris Parnell), and secretary Cheryl (Judy Greer) who changes her name from episode to episode.

From the very beginning the roots of the aforementioned adult swim classic, and Reed’s follow-up Frisky Dingo, are readily apparent, and that’s what makes Archer such a pleasure to watch. For an animated show to not be about the animation is always a risk, but the story, dialog, and just overall fun of the series clearly make up for it. Granted the animation has come a long way from Reed’s reusing of frames from Sealab 2020, but it has always been about the story, the situations, and the gratuitous violence that has brought viewers in.

The style of the show, set in a contemporary world, but with throwbacks to the spy movies of the 1950’s and 1960’s is excellent. More than a few Bond gags make their way into the early part of the season, including ridiculously named villains with quirks built in. Archer himself is a bumbling moron who, at times, seems to only have made it this far because of his overbearing mother, but does show flashes of how good he can be in later episodes.

Being on FX gives the animators and producers some more leeway on what they can show and what they can say, and while it’s usually shameful to push the envelope for the sake of shock, that’s what really works here. No show has done better cutaways since Family Guy, and even FOX’s cash cow could take a few notes.

In the end Archer comes together in a great mix of classic characters, hilarious dialog, visual gags, throwback jokes and a sense that we haven’t learned anything in the last 22 minutes, but we had a damn good time spending it with the ISIS team, even if our codename is Duchess.

Food Network has long prided itself on showcasing some of the world’s greatest chefs, and that doesn’t really change with its newest series, Worst Cooks in America, however the great chefs showcased have to deal with some of the country’s worst. In the pilot episode, lovingly titled “Into the Fire” the chefs bring in 24 of the worst of the worst and have them prepare a signature dish, and you get what you would expect.

Several of the contestants can’t even cook, throwing together several cans of soup, warmed over the stove top and presenting it as something edible. From there Chef’s Anne Burrell and Beau MacMillan throw in a twist, they’re picking the six finalists for each other, and they’re picking the very worst in an attempt to sabotage the other. The “winner”, besides being able to actually create food not considered toxic waste in 27 states, will attempt to fool a panel of food critics into believing Anne and Beau cooked a meal for them.

The series hook is that these cooks know they are pathetic and each are looking to better themselves by participating in the contest, a big difference from series like Hell’s Kitchen where the Chef’s are usually filled with illusions of grandeur and listening to them is like reading a textbook out loud describing how to be a complete failure on reality TV.

Most importantly though, the show is fun to watch because they have about as much skill as the rest of the general population, who will cut asparagus wrong, garnish the hell out of a dish, and take two hours to make a 30 minute meal. Worst Cooks in America‘s six episode run should give hope for mankind that even if you screw up mac & cheese now, it may not always be that way.

Logitech’s upgrade to the G11, the G110, is an excellent gaming keyboard with a number of features that will certainly make any gamer or desktop power user, take kindly to it and never look back.

The most notable feature is, as with all gaming-focused keyboards, the programmable keys that can be linked to just about any function, macro, script, or shortcut in both Windows applications and games. The keyboard comes with 12 “G” keys to the left side with three profiles (M1, M2, M3) that are easily programmed and allow for on-the-fly switching, effectively giving you 36 programmable keys. Each of the three profiles can be assigned a color from red to blue and anything in between (meaning lots of shades of purple are possible). While the backlight for the keys isn’t quite as bright as you would like, the color differences are noticeable if you stay to extreme ends of the spectrum. Progressively lighter shades of purple won’t do you much good here.

Another great feature is the “desktop/gaming mode” switch located above the first bank of Function Keys along the top. Clicking this over into “game” mode disables the Windows and Context Keys making inadvertent trips to the desktop a thing of the past when you really just wanted to hit CTRL to crouch behind a crate.

Along the top ridge are standard mini jacks for your gaming headset (microphone and headset) as well as mute buttons for each. Also available is a standard USB 2.0 jack, although this jack is non-powered. To the upper right corner are the standard media controls with a volume control wheel and a mute button, all work natively with Windows without any additional software.

To program all of the function keys you’ll need to install the provided Logitech software which allows for customized programming of each of the 36 “G” keys, for basic functionality you can enter in your own macro commands, or record a keystroke macro and make common functions easier to perform. For desktop power users you can even enter in blocks of text that make repetitive typing easier.

The keys themselves are very soft and quite, after being used to a slightly more rigid keyboard for typing, it takes some getting used to, but you adapt quickly depending on your need for tactical feedback. The extra size of the keyboard (due to the programmable keys) makes finding your “home” location a bit more difficult without looking and the nubs on the F and J keys are a little smaller than usual, so don’t be surprised if you somehow start on the wrong key and hit CAPS LOCK a bunch in the beginning, you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

In the end the G110 is a solid, thin, and versatile keyboard that allows for deep customization in a variety of applications, while profile importing is allowed, there isn’t a huge community actively hosting profiles to download, but even generic gaming profiles would get novices users on the right foot, maybe even game publishers releasing recommended profiles wouldn’t be such a bad thing. You can’t go wrong with the G110, coupled with a G9 Laser Mouse to frag some aliens this weekend.

Director Roland Emmerich doesn’t hide his disdain for our little blue planet, or maybe he just sees so many opportunities to kill millions in the most spectacular ways possible. What are the logical chances that the USS John F. Kennedy, pushed by a gigantic tsunami, hits the White House head on and destroys it? Certainly the shot in question is going for a bit of CGI nostalgia as the last time Emmerich destroyed the White House Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum destroyed an alien civilization with a Macintosh.

Years after the vastly disappointing Day After Tomorrow, Roland is back to distribute destruction spectacle like no other. Michael Bay must sit home at night wondering how he can get Emmerich to marry him, or at least return his phone calls. 2012 is based on the well known Mayan prediction that December 21, 2012 will results in the end of the world, in this film that equates to the Earth’s crust shifting, massive title waves, and a few hundred thousand being saved aboard arks the government has been constructing for three years.

While the story is as far fetched as they come, you really aren’t traveling to your local Cineplex for award winning dialog and a character piece bestowed with emotion, instead you want to see the world come to an end in the most awesome way possible. For the first 90 minutes, 2012 delivers everything you could possible ask for (and more), but when the script ends the world and starts to focus on the 2D characters we were forced to escape from a host of perilous situations the wheels come tumbling off.

Really we don’t care about failed author Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) or his ex-wife, or their kids, her new boyfriend. We don’t care about Oliver Platt’s power grab after the President (Danny Glover) bites the big one (that isn’t much of a spoiler; you see it coming like a 1,000 foot tidal wave). There just isn’t enough to get excited about, the “good” characters survive and the underlying theme of putting your well being aside to save the greater good was done hundreds of times better twenty five years ago in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

So you’ll be munching on popcorn for well over two hours, enjoying every minute of the collapse of modern civilization, you’ll be beaten over the head a few times with morals so blatantly obvious that anyone who doesn’t get it should be purged from the gene pool, and finally the film kind of ends with the remains of human civilization setting sail to start a new life, and give Emmerich new ideas on how he can have them perish into the bowels of the planet.

Spawning from The Jason Ellis Show on SiriusXM’s Faction, Taintstick’s Six Pounds of Sound is everything you expect from a collection of guys with nicknames like “Shaft Burn”; and “Tussinwolf”;. Fans of the show will immediately know what each band member is known for and lead singer Jason Ellis manages to hold a key throughout the album, changing up his sound and delivering to his fans a great little package of metal farce mixed in with catchy lyrics and some sweet guitar riffs.

Most of the songs on the album have been featured on the radio at one time or another during the production of the album, yet some are new to even the most die hard fans and bleed into a Steel Panther-like mentality of “death to all but metal.”; How else do you write an album and get through performing it with titles like “Sir Eagle Cock III“;, “Motodick“;, and “Monkeys of War“;?

The variation in the tracks is surprisingly vast with the hard hitting title track, and the aforementioned “Monkeys”; encouraging you to pump up the volume whereas softer tracks like “Apple Juice”; fall into an almost Blink-182 low-key melodic sound where you’re asked to pay attention to the ludicrous lyrics and laugh a little bit.

Laughing is certainly something that you’ll do as you make your way through the disc especially on “Sir Eagle Cock III“; an Irish-like jig that tells the story of a faithful noble bird, who was never blessed with genitals or “I Love Tiger, I Love Fifty“; sung by Ellis’ daughter which is basically the title repeated ad nauseam (Tiger is Ellis’ infant son and Fifty is the lead singer’s dog). However the biggest laugh comes in the form of a clean version of “Fuck Your Face“; included as the disc’s last track in which every word is pretty much skipped and only the backbeat remains.

Taintstick’s debut may only suffer from one thing and that’s the inability to be taken seriously in the long term. Fans of the show, of which this reviewer is one, will immediately have a lot to love out of the gate, however casual fans may find it hard to grasp on to anything without knowing the backstory. Was Six Pounds of Sound just a one-and-done release or will we continue to get new music from the band?

Regardless of the long term aspects, the thirteen tracks we do get are worthy of repeated sampling and should keep you laughing well into the next year.

Where FX has excelled in the drama game the network has always seemed to struggle on the flipside of the programming coin in the comedy genre. Save for the wildly popular It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, shows like Starved, Testees, and Lucky have always missed the mark for various reasons. The network recently unveiled a new slate of original programming including several comedies and dramas, the first of which is the fantasy football-themed The League which continues the network tradition of vivid characters based on excellent writing.

Breaking away from the sight-gag laced Testees, The League centers on an ensemble cast of characters all joined together by friendship and their desire to one-up each other in fantasy football. The competition is nothing to be taken lightly as characters influence each other in their work and home lives, all to get Peyton Manning.

The writing is sharp in the first two episodes with more than a few laugh out loud moments and more than a few hearty chuckles strewn about. What really works is the believable, relatable characters all pulled from the sitcom stable including the recently separated, charming guy; the clueless friend who drafts retired players; the married dude who has to watch porn in the garage while working out. Well, you get to expand the normal staples when you’re on cable.

A few standout moments are Taco’s (Jon Lajoie) wholly inappropriate song at a pre-teen’s birthday party, you know where its going from the very beginning, but there’s something about harmonizing and explaining various sexual positions that really makes you laugh. Nick Kroll’s Ruxin and his desire to win the fantasy league so bad he kidnaps an “oracle” leads to another stand out, laugh out loud moment that looks really, really bad, but you never realized implied pedophilia could be so funny.

The show has a semi-serialized nature to it, at least in regards to the first few episodes, and the “league” aspect is used (so far) as merely a framing device for a few jokes and as an excuse for everyone to stay together. In the end, however, The League is a very funny entry into FX’s already stellar lineup or originals, as long as the first season stays Sunny and avoids being Starved the future looks bright.