Worse than smooth jazz, there is smooth rock. And Platinum Weird, the collaboration product of Dave Stewart and Kara DioGuardi, is so smooth it’s glossy — shiny, gleaming, sickeningly glossy.

The group dates back to 1974, when Stewart and original muse Erin Grace debuted at Mick Jagger’s birthday party, where they quickly enjoyed cult status and slowly slithered into London’s rock scene. They signed on immediately to Elton John’s Rocket label and began to lay down album tracks. Then Grace disappeared — and the magic stopped.

But not for Stewart. He found famous muse number two, Annie Lennox, and created the brilliant Eurythmics. Now the story gets complicated, and intriguingly marketable. One day, in a fit of nostalgia, Stewart strummed a measure from an old Platinum Weird song. DioGuardi walked in and began to sing exactly the lyrics penned by Stewart and Grace over three decades ago! Was this a reincarnated Grace?

No, only a young girl whose dreams of musical fame were flamed by an older, wiser woman from New York, who — as logic and really good luck would have it — was Grace. She reappeared in the annals of rock history, and thus humanity is now terribly burdened by PW’s re-released album, Make Believe. Their bizarrely coincidental, supremely marketable history does not stir the skeptic in me so much as knock it off its arse.

History aside, Stewart and DioGuardi make music like they make stories: pulling hearts with painful cliches, easy-listening rock sets and belches of sentimentality of such caliber that Hallmark could take lessons.