I thought we were rid of P.O.D., but I must be praying wrong. They're back!

P.O.D. makes blunt, brainless hard rock music in the vein of, say, Limp Bizkit circa 1999.

It's the kind of nasty, nearly unlistenable stuff you hear pouring out of open garage doors on hot summer afternoons in every suburb in the country. We're lucky that most of those 13-year-olds down the block don't have record contracts. But we're not so lucky that P.O.D., after five years of silence, has held its contract.

After boy bands and before The White Stripes, there was an awkward period in pop music, during which the best anybody could come up with was rap-metal. It was in those halcyon days that P.O.D. caught their biggest whiff of fame, releasing the one-two-three garbage-punch of "Rock the Party," "Alive" and "Youth of the Nation". The fates conspired to bring us the quick and painful death rap-metal shortly after the turn of the century, and it's barely been heard from since. I sure haven't missed it. But some of you jokers out there must've, since P.O.D. is back in a shockingly big way with the group's new record, Testify.

Not much has changed since the band's heyday a half-decade ago; P.O.D. is still a really, terribly, unimaginably awful band. Musically, they're still nothing but a fourth-rate Rage Against the Machine, weaving one slop-bucket metal riff into the next. Sonny Sandoval is a bad singer and an even worse MC, and it's still nothing short of torture to hear him croon and rhyme on the same song. And, yes, they're still quite Christian.

I can say with some confidence that there's never been a good rock band that's ever self-identified as Christian. That's not a knock on Christianity (like I always say, Jesus is just all right with me), it's just an inextricable correlation. And even if P.O.D. were blood-guzzling Satan-praisers, they'd still be crappy. But people with bad taste have enough problems without having religion shoved down their throats. And it worries me that the impressionable minds P.O.D.'s proselytizing reaches will not only be unwittingly converted, but also sustain eardrum damage in the process. I just don't think Jesus would be very sympathetic to that sort of thing.

To be honest, I've only made it all the way through Testify once; human beings simply weren't built to withstand this kind of torture. I can say, though, that there isn't a single song on it that'll catch fire like "Youth of the Nation" did, which hopefully means you won't have to hear any P.O.D. unless you seek it out for yourself.

That's the thing about bands like P.O.D.; yes, they're terrible, but as long as they don't have hits, they don't bother me none. But when you're walking down the street, minding your own business, and you're smacked in the face by a steaming hunk of Christian rap-metal, well, that's the kind of thing that could really ruin your day. Grade: F