Metal Underground.com

When I love — or loathe — an album, it's much easier to write a review of it. If I'm impressed, I can't wait to share my love for a disc with all of you, and if it's a stinker, I'm more than happy to tell you all to stay the hell away from it.

Then there's something like the sampler for Canadian act the Veer Union's "Against The Grain" album, which I listened to again and again — and felt nothing each time. The album's radio-rock sound is just that generic. A look at the bands the album's producers, Brian Howes and Greg Archilla, have worked with — Daughtry, Collective Soul, Hunder and Rev Theory — shows you just what you're going to hear.

I've got to give credit where credit's due and point out that singer Crispin Earl has a good voice for this kind of thing — when it's not being covered up with auto-tune or an overabundance of background vocals. The guitar work by Eric Schraeder and James Fiddler is competent, though unexceptional.

The tracks are pretty much interchangeable, though the album's single, "Seasons," stands a smidgen above "Youth Of Yesterday." The sampler's worst track, by far, is "Over Me," a predictable break-up song in which "you're gone" and "I can't seem to move on."

This three-song sampler did nothing to make me want to pick up the Veer Union's 2009 album, "Against The Grain," but it didn't exactly offend my senses either. If you like pop-tinged hard rock radio fare, you might like this, but for me, it was far too generic.