Strange, bizarre, or just plain nuts,
Vampire Mooose crafts the kind of metallic hodgepodge that attempts innovation by taking all the modern metal genres, tossing them in the blender, and pouring out big, thick, and rich glasses of commendably insane goop. The group's self-titled debut excursion welds hardcore, death metal, rapcore grooves, grinding blastbeats,
Meshuggah-style start-stop insanity, spacy
Mr. Bungle jazz-circus doodles, and the psychedelic kitchen sink into a massive, twisted, and slightly disturbing sculpture designed to bludgeon the listener with nine different styles of pummel over the course of a single song. Toss in vaguely decipherable, howled lyrics that toe the line between parody and deranged scribbling ("S Mart," "Spiderman vs. Venom"), and you have a ferocious mess of a record that leaves indelible stains on the psyche (as well as the carpeting).
Candiria is a somewhat distant reference point, but where that band is more urban, arty, and calculated,
Vampire Mooose is dirtier, rustier, and crankier, presumably assembled like Frankenstein's monster in a desolate barn by some disturbed individuals washing down various hallucinogenic tablets with big gulps of moonshine. Sometimes,
Vampire Mooose attempts innovation through sheer force of will, but while the band's constructs sound a bit unnatural at times ("Del Fontineau"), they are quite often inspired (the way-out-there flanged riffery of "Waltz del Monstruo," the highly technical crunch of "Adamantium Elbow"). Give
the Moooses heaps of credit for assembling a raw, ambitious debut, even if it kind of makes you want to report their shenanigans to the National Security Agency. ~ John Serba