### The Morning After: You can't hurt steel

#### 19/06/09 || Smalley

Remember how the “Metal by numbers” video began, with Mr. Posehn getting disgusted at how lame the “metal” band on his TV was? I don’t think that bit’s effectiveness would be lessened at all if you inserted footage of The Morning After instead. Like Blood Mortized, this band’s debut album is coming out in ’09, but unlike Mortized, I can sense very, very little potential here. “You can’t hurt steel” is the standard metalcore record, with silly cookie monster growling, a whiny lead singer, gang vocal action, faux-dramatic song breakdowns, harmonized lead guitars, castrated Gothenburg riffs, you name the ‘core cliché, The Morning After has it here.

After some useless bullshit in the intro track, “Lost in time” (ugh, did they have to remind me of Iron Maiden?) introduces the listener to TMA’s basic sound, which is mostly just variations on the metalcore elements that I listed, and won’t be getting any better as this album goes along. Vocalist Sam Robinson screws up his introduction to the world with a weak, generic growl, then does an annoying falsetto scream, maybe so The Morning After can pretend to be both “melodic death” and an “80’s glam metal throwback”, respectively. And unfortunately, there are much higher, much more annoying screams still to come here, and Robinson still annoys when he’s using his lower-pitched whine or cookie monster. And from “Lost”, nothing truly worth mentioning happens here; maybe about 0.4% of the material on “steel” is somewhat interesting, and the drumming is pretty decent, I admit, but so what? It all drowns beneath the relentless flood of metalcore, and though I can’t say The Morning After reached Avenged Sevenfold-level annoying for me (for which I am thankful), it still doesn’t make this album worth anything.

And again, like with Blood mortized, I have to ask; what the hell is up with the names? Not only is the band name really shitty this time, but the album name is as well, and any metalhead who likes the good stuff should be able to connect those crappy names with: (1) the dumbass album cover (there’s a big version of it on their MySace if you want a closer gander) (2) the band’s awful sense of fashion (3) and even their logo, and figure out that this one band to be avoided. With so much lame shit collected in one place, you can just tell. Anyway, as Al Pacino once said, don’t waste my motherfucken time (hey, how do you know it wasn’t the en version in Heat?), and since I’ve already said my piece, I won’t be wasting any more of my, or my readers’, fucken time with this.

5 annoying hangovers the day after out of 10.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Rising Records
- Website: The Morning After MySpace
- The Morning After
- Sam Robinson: vocals, guitar
- Jay Bude: bass, vocals
- Phil Maher: guitar
- Reece Bude: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Metropolis
- 02 Lost In Time
- 03. Hell And High Water
- 04. Glitter And Bombs
- 05 Crush Kill Destroy
- 06. In The Heart Of The Young
- 07. Atlantis
- 08. Sometime After Dark
- 09. The Destroyer
- 10. You Can’t Hurt Steel