When I read the press materials that accompanied Breaking Benjamin’s full-length debut Saturate, I could hardly wait to get the CD into my stereo and hear the new gospel according to Hollywood Records. I mean, what music fan wouldn’t be titillated by such powerful characterizations as “speaker-melting riffage” or “amp-joy intensity?”

I should give the label credit for trying, I suppose. Still, as long as we’re making up completely asinine new phrases to describe Breaking Benjamin, why not something like “hype-regurgitated suckage” or “derivative-boredom insanity”?

It’s hard to conceive a better title for the album than Saturate, especially when you consider how well the band, their producer and their label have squeezed so much unlistenable, overproduced trash into a single offering. The latest in a series of below-average “gerund bands”–right down there with Drowning Pool and Disturbed–Breaking Benjamin cranks out predictable hard rock that sounds more like assembly-line radio twaddle than the slightest attempt at original songwriting.

The album is riveting for about six seconds, at which time singer/guitarist Ben Burnley jumps on board “Wish I May” with the standard bleating howl of a thousand nu-metal bands before him. Then come four bars of staccato chunk-rock, followed by Burnley’s best post-Creed baritone and a meandering solo that owes quite a bit to more musical bands like Nirvana or the Smashing Pumpkins.

Aside from being music that has been done and redone by half-assed garage bands since 1994 or so, Saturate suffers most from a frustrating inability to support what few decent melodies and ideas lurk around the album. The CD’s first single “Polyamorous” has as catchy a verse/chorus as this band can probably write, yet the rambling bridge sounds misplaced and unfinished. The oppressive volume that befalls “No Games” and “Phase” betrays the mild imagination and dynamics of both songs’ intros, and Burnley wastes the genuinely nifty beginning of “Natural Life” with a Gavin Rossdale imitation so embarrassing it must be heard to be believed.

Producer Ulrich Wild (Deftones, Powerman 5000) uses every studio trick in the book to manufacture that tooth-loosening heaviness that is so in vogue with 14-year-old N’Sync graduates, while alienating (and likely insulting) any rational adult listeners who know enough to walk around a pile of crap when they see one. Whatever edge the songs may have had before recording is a casualty of Wild’s indiscretion with vocal and drum effects, and Stephen Marcussen’s mastering pushes headache-inducing levels of low end out of arrangements that are agonizing enough without his help.

One listen to the misguided rock rehash of Saturate makes it obvious why Hollywood Records has to resort to phrases like “iron-fisted backbeat” and “tuneful urgency” to speak for Breaking Benjamin: Nothing on the record suggests that this band can even remotely speak for itself.