So I bought this bag of 50 random bargain cds and now I’m going to review every last one of them. This batch has a lot of pop music, sold lots of cds and now they are right back in the store.

CD 24/50: Mandy Moore – Mandy Moore (2001)

A second Mandy Moore CD founds its way out of the bag. It is her self-titled effort from 2001 and it’s biggest hit appears to be “In My Pocket.” That song is another pretty generic pop song with a big chorus as a hook and a little breakdown part in the middle. A very uptempo song as the album actually has a good variance on tempo of songs. The song “Crush” was also a minor hit and sounds like a bad Natalie Merchant song. Overall this third album by Moore sounds a little better than her first but still isn’t anything that will find its way into my rotation.

CD 25/50: Ashlee Simpson – Autobiography (2004)

This #1 album was a huge hit back in 2004. With her sister Jessica already topping charts Ashlee Simpson had a leg up and used it. Her song “Pieces of Me” was a nice pop song that had some guitar and a little bit of a spine. It sounds like the acoustic lick from Incubus’ “Pardon Me” actually. The quasi-punk sounding “La La” shows the kind of album she was trying to make. It has crunchy guitar and snarly vocals. It was pop music focused at less the homecoming queen and more at the outcast crowd. Either way it worked quite well, the album went 3x platinum.

CD 26 & 27/50: Britney Spears – Femme Fatale (2011) & Britney Spears – Circus (2008)

This “double pack” of CDs really is going to exhaust the Britney Spears quota in my collection. They are her “comeback” era albums after she was on top of the world and then fell from grace. They are both #1 albums still, the main songs you’ll know here include “Womanizer” and “Hold It Against Me” If you know Britney Spears’ music you know what to expect here and that is what you get. What songs are on what record here isn’t really important, it’s all white rice. Other singles off these records charted and were successful but it still sounds like it has churned through the pop machine.

CD 28/50: Terri Clark – Pain To Kill (2003)

Another Terri Clark CD too, they are really filling out my collection of artists I never wanted in the first place. Clark isn’t terrible but it still is more of that 90s country sound that isn’t too enthralling to listen to. This album has the hit “I Just Wanna Be Mad” and also “I Wanna Do It All” which were both top 3 country hits. I remember “I Wanna Do It All” probably because it has a baseball reference in it, even if it is the Yankees. There’s nothing too special here still, another okay pop-country cd from the late 90s and early 00s and there isn’t a whole lot else to say about it.

CD 29/50: Semisonic – Feeling Strangely Fine (1998)

Hell yeah! I’m a big Semisonic fan and pulling this CD from the bag both made sense and made me happy. We all know the big hit here, “Closing Time” dominated rock radio back in 1998 and still is a frequent play on many stations. You’ll also hear it as bars and other businesses are closing, how clever. What you might not know is that Semisonic is a fantastic band with far more great songs than their big hit. On this album alone you have the sweet “Secret Smile” and the Ben Folds-esque “Never You Mind.” The best song on this album though (yes, even better than “Closing Time”) is “Singing In My Sleep.” The rocking song is a power-pop anthem that never got the credit it deserved.

CD 30/50: Cody Simpson – 4U EP (2010)

This is an early EP from pop artist Cody Simpson and it is beyond garbage. The Australian teen heartthrob was born in 1997 so some quick math tells us he was 13 when this EP hit the shelves. It sounds like it too. It is about the most juvenile crap pop you can imagine. Flo-Rida guests on one song called “IYIYI” and there is a video for that one, if you can make it to the end of it you are a bigger man than I. This is probably the worst CD I’ve pulled from the bag thus far.