Welcome to yet another indescribably lame week of new album releases. It now seems like light years ago, when on a single week we got new music from R.E.M. and the Stones (it was actually about two months back). It even seems like a lifetime since the new albums from Mariah Carey and Mudcrutch, and those came out just earlier this month.

Speaking of Mudcrutch, this week brings a new Greatest Hits disc from lead mudcrutcher Tom Petty. And while we're on the subject of "mud," let's not forget Mudhoney.

Back before the rest of the world discovered what we flannelheads out here in lumberjack country already knew as grunge, Mudhoney were Seattle's favorite sons. I mean, where else but late eighties Seattle could you find a band that sounded like Blue Cheer fronted by a Stooges-era Iggy Pop? Yet that was exactly how Mudhoney sounded on the groundbreaking EP Superfuzz Bigmuff.

This week, those fine folks at SubPop are issuing a deluxe, expanded edition of that landmark EP, and expanding it from its original six songs to a whomping, stomping 32 tracks. Mudhoney also has a brand new full length album — their eighth, for those counting — out this week called The Lucky Ones.

The other big release this week is from a band that may or may not be otherwise known as Green Day, called the Foxboro Hot Tubs. From its trippy, old style album jacket artwork, to the music contained within, Stop Drop and Roll!!! screams sixties rock from it's head, to, well, it's head. But we mean that in a good way. You'll find no American Idiot style Bush bashing here. Just plenty of punked up sixties style rock in the best Stones/Kinks/Who sort of tradition.

Scarlett Johannson's album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head is getting terrible reviews pretty much across the board, including a good solid thrashing from BC's own Donald Gibson. Actually, much to his credit, Gibson was his usual very polite, charming self, even as he pretty much ripped this CD a new one.

Now, here's Tom Johnson with this week's math lesson. Today's class is on multiplication:

X equals 10 and V equals 5. So that's 10 to the tenth power times 5...carry the 1... whatever. It's higher math, but this is, believe it or not, the group's fifteenth album. I'm going out on a limb here - I can't imagine what the "15" means otherwise. Fourteen albums bearing the King's X moniker and one by Sneak Preview, the early version of the band that simply bore a different name. Makes sense to me, in a weird way. Michael Wagener, who really tightened things up when he produced the band's previous album, Ogre Tones, is back to crack the whip for XV. Expect more deep, driving grooves, catchy melodies, and the always incredible guitar work of Ty Tabor. Why this band has continually suffered from near anonymity is beyond me. Same old story, isn't it? You know what to do about that, don't you?