When Maxim gave two and a half stars to The Black Crowes' new album Warpaint, suspicions everywhere were raised pretty quickly.

Because, come on, two and a half stars out of five for an album by The Black Crowes? That's a bit bloody generous by anyone's standards.

Anyway, now that The Black Crowes have kicked up an almighty stink about Maxim's fake Warpaint review, the magazine has been forced into issuing a humiliating apology that's bound to harm its readership. After all, how are horny teenage boys expected to wank themselves into a sticky mess over pictures of Megan Fox in a bikini now they know that a blues-oriented hard rock jam-band got given an invented but probably accurate review in a previous issue?

You might think that the average Maxim reader would be too busy scouring pictures of Eva Longoria in her knickers for traces of cameltoe to pay attention to any of the music reviews because, face it, what is a CD to the average Maxim reader if not a shiny, perfectly-round girlfriend with a sex hole in the middle?

Nevertheless, although Maxim readers couldn't give a stuff about its album reviews, the bands that make the albums obviously seem to. That was the case when The Black Crowes noticed that their new album Warpaint gained a mediocre two and a half out of five stars in the new issue of Maxim. Which was weird, since there were no advance copies of Warpaint around at the time.

Now, we know what you're thinking. You're thinking that this Black Crowes album is going to be as full of the same guffy old uninspired retrogressive Rolling Stones/ Lynyrd Skynyrd claptrap as the last Black Crowes album, and the one before that, and the one before that, and you're probably right.

But this didn't stop The Black Crowes from throwing a gigantic shitty tantrum about it until Maxim revealed that it hadn't actually heard the album all the way through and was merely making an 'educated guess' about it, even though anyone with the slightest amount of education would see that the Maxim review was about four stars kinder than it really had any right to be.

Still, Maxim has finally decided to properly apologise for the mix-up anyway, as BBC News reports:

Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky said in a statement: "It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. "Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologise to our readers." A spokeswoman for the magazine refused to say if the journalist responsible would face disciplinary action.

As amateurish a mistake this was, at least it has forced some real change in the Maxim editorial department. For instance, when The Black Crowes release their next album, Maxim has decided to do the right thing and admit that it hasn't heard the album, reveal that it'd rather ram pounds of Anthrax down its cockhole with a splintery twig than ever actually listen to anything by The Black Crowes anyway and then quietly refer its readers to page 56 where they can see a lovely picture of Jessica Simpson's tits which is probably more their sort of thing anyway.

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Maxim 'sorry' over fake CD review – BBC