Ever wish there was music that could duplicate the feeling of a throbbing migraine?

I hate The Reel, the new album from Vampire Mooose, so much that I actually went back and re-listened to their last album, Serenade the Samurai, just to make sure it holds up. That’s not a great album by any means, but it is a good one – thirty-five minutes of really ugly melodic death metal fueled by elephants-marching metalcore riffs at their finest. You might forget about it a couple of days after you get it, but Samurai is a totally solid album. I could see that version of Vampire Mooose playing a show with Gojira. They might get blown off the stage, but they’d be there and they wouldn’t get booed.

The Reel is just a boring as fuck, paint-by-numbers deathcore album. It’s “heavier” than Samurai, I guess, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it sucks. Every song here could be by any number of the forgettable unsigned bands that we so crudely make fun of on this very website.

All I could think as I listened to this album was “Holy shit, is this still going on?” It’s like getting woken up on a Sunday morning by a construction crew outside your window (or maybe like a pretty bird or something if you’re not a piece of scum shit that grew up in the city) – this album mostly sounds annoying right at the worst possible time for you to feel annoyed.

There’s nothing even remotely creative about this record. There isn’t a single riff you haven’t heard before.  Track #2, the title of which I refuse to re-type because it has lots of weird uses of punctuation and fuck this album, should is like a mad-libs of deathcore clichés. A song called “Kill Don Henley,” somehow ends up being an insult to Don Henley fans and Martin Scorsese fans, and “Spider-Man vs. Venom” is so bad it makes Spider-Man 3 look like The Godfather. The only breakdown that even kinda made me wanna bang my head, on a song called “Pot Pie,” is really just a gussied-up Korn riff. A GUSSIED-UP KORN RIFF, I SAY. Only the first four and half  vocal-free minutes of the ten minute album closer “Drayton Sowyer”  is even remotely memorable, and then mostly as something you might hear in the trailer for a new WWE movie.

And did I mention fuck this album? I’d give it a pity horn or horn n’ a half, but that would be a disservice to the new Atreyu record.

(1 teabag out of five)

-AR