I really enjoyed Abney Park's music during my steampunk phase (and it's still a lot of fun, though I haven't heard anything of theirs since Aether Shanties), but their lyrics are just...so bad.
They tend to be overly reliant on simplistic rhymes and they often twist around the meanings of words and the structures of sentences just to make them fit the silly rhyme scheme. The vocabulary is equally simplistic, and the general composition seems like it's trying way too hard to sound poetic. It just sounds so high schoolish. Even the subject matter tends to be pretty dopey.
Some examples:
"I run on the wrong side of life,
I'm the one that you fear when you hold your wife
I run where the darker crowds run,
On the rain swept streets where the black rain runs" (a song about being a goth, by the way; all the sheep fear goths while holding their wives, of course)
"A heroine, a deity
On heroin or vanity
To jack their personality
Beyond normal humanity" (a song about a man, so he can't be a heroine...but it sounds like heroin so put in there!)
"Dear Ophelia, I know that he is dead,
But what he told me last night lays on me like lead
In the orchard he lay sleeping, that's why he didn't hear
His brother crept up and poured poison in his ear" (note: ear is also sung like 'eeeeeaaaaeeaaaaeeaahheerrrrr')
"Sleep, sleep, my Isabella
Safely in your carousella
Sleep through the spinning,
Just like your beginning
Sleep, my child" (argh, don't add syllables to words just to make them rhyme!)
And I'm done.
Still fun, dancey tunes though!
