Mayday Parade - Tales Told By Dead Friends

When Absolute Punk publishes a review touting a mediocre score for a pop-punk release, you know it's gotta be pretty bad. Mayday Parade's Tales Told By Dead Friends would be titled more appropriately as Songs Already Sung By a Bunch of Other Bands Who Sucked From the Start But Got Signed Anyway Because They're An Easy Sell To Impressionable Kids; if you're a high schooler who thinks that the sun rises and sets on Fall Out Boy and the slew of one-dimensional, infantile bands who flew into the limelight as Creed and Nickelback started to descend, you'll be able to stomach it. Maybe. I asked someone what they thought of this, and he summed it up by telling me that Mayday Parade has a line in their song that goes, "Girls make boys cry." I couldn't make it past track three, and only that far because I had already turned the volume low enough, opting instead to concentrate on how many teenage girls this band has as friends on Myspace. I'm sure it's more than I have. I bet it's a shit-ton. And I'd say that this release is a ton of shit. Fodder for the post-New Found Glory cash-in. Fearless Records: You've had At the Drive-In, you've had The Aquabats. What's with this? *Note: The 0.2 score for this release was based on the fact that it's an EP, meaning I wasted less time listening to it than I would have had it been a full-length record. Had the latter scenario been the case, a whopping 0.0 would have been the final judgment. I'm making this one a coaster for my chocolate milk and root beer. [www.fearlessrecords.com]