Hot Action Cop

Somewhere between Sugar Ray’s pasty-faced Afro puffs and Crazy Town’s tighty-whitey posing lies Hot Action Cop. Head HAC Rob Werthner relocated from New York to Nashville, ostensibly to delve into the country music capital’s allegedly thriving hip-hop scene. As a rapper, however, Werthner sounds like he’s spent most of his time in Hollywood, peppering his pedestrian mic attempts with tall tales of teen-age debauchery that would make the cast of American Pie blush.

So I’m dreamin’ that I’m sleeping with Britney Spears/And then I wake up to the smell of cigarettes and beer, he ejaculates on “Don’t Want Her to Stay.” The noxious mini-hit “Fever for the Flavor” has the audacity to rhyme hootchie and kootchie with a straight face, and the doe-eyed “soul” ballad “The Special” is supposed to atone for sexist, taint-by-numbers party jams with cute titles like “Club Slut” and “Goin’ Down on It.”

To its credit, the band is an equal-opportunity thief, pilfering from Alice in Chains (“Face Around”), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Doom Boom”) and Uncle Kracker (“Alayal” — as in, I wanna get with all of y’all girls). But HAC has arrived at the rap-rock party a few years too late, submitting a clichéd set of low-wattage retreads.