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For Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross sought to guide the music in a whole new direction, taking the nastiest spin from the Badelt approach in 2007 and attempting to emulate the "cooler" aspects of Daniel Pemberton's Spider-Verse music. Reznor and Ross had spent a few years of their film scoring endeavors poorly emulating the ambient soundscapes of Thomas Newman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem represents a return to a more expected sound for them. It would be interesting to know if this production spent the same amount of money on Reznor and Ross that the prior ones had on Tyler and Jablonsky, because it's not frequent that you get such trashy, low-budget music from big-name composers as what you hear in this seventh entry. Performing the score themselves, these men utterly fail to capture the same personality or technical prowess conveyed by Pemberton in the Spider-Verse scores. In fact, they violate most of the basic tenets of film scoring in general, writing and recording grungy, industrial electronica atmosphere that serves more as a standalone album than a functional score. Some of their obnoxious cues, like the static-laden "Goochie Goochie Goo," were cut from the movie in favor of songs, likely to the betterment of the film overall. It's difficult to qualify just how atrociously distracting and inappropriate parts of this work can sound, Reznor and Ross infusing their electronica with 8-bit tones that reach back to the wrong era for the concept. There is no orchestral (or even faux-orchestral) presence, leaving only synthetics, keyboarding, guitars, and percussion to carry the load. The sound effects employed in this environment, led by the mind-numbing "The Man in the Basement," are hideous, and the slurred pitches of "Murder the Shreks!" make it among the worst chase cues of the century. Cues heavily manipulated with artificial-sounding starts and ends are a massive detriment on album, not to mention the usual backwards edit processing and other techniques that have seen better days, if ever. A promising anthem-like motif, for instance, ends suddenly in "Accept Us," and the subsequent "Puke Girl" concludes in the same fashion. Many of these cues are terribly brief.

More problematic than the wretched tone of the work is the composers' absolute neglect of any meaningful narrative development. There's no start, middle, or end to this score, let alone any story to tell within individual cues. Each track seems to introduce new motifs without much connection to the others. The grunginess of the attitude simply wears on you cue after cue when Reznor and Ross aren't making some token attempt to generate a glimmer of warmth in the character cues. These moments sometimes emulate Vangelis but fail at achieving depth or caring, debuting on keyboard in "Maybe One Day" and transitioning to the score's one recurring motif on solo piano for all of "Something to Love," a moment that doesn't fit whatsoever with the rest of the score. Bubbly electronic keyboarding returns in "What's the Worst That Could Happen?," and distorted equivalents in "We Only Need Each Other" revisit the "Something to Love" material. Palatable moments are interrupted by thumping droning in "We're Very Well Adjusted" while long, dreamy sustains in "Do You Need a Veterinarian?" are bracketed by horrific noise. The composers try to compensate with the solo piano again at the end of "A Zed and Two Noughts," the instrument leading a compelling atmosphere in "Better Than Mark Ruffalo" with a somewhat nice crescendo. The same keyboarded tones extend to "Thing From My Past" but disintegrate into dissonance. To conclude the picture, the piano theme from "Something to Love" is reprised in the comparatively upbeat "Happy Ending/Sewer Home," a repetitively simplistic light rock moment with literally no resolution at the end. A listener could assemble five to ten minutes of this less obnoxious music for rather easy but anonymous listening, but don't expect to remember anything from it. You are more likely to recall the atonal, high-pitched, rhythmic sound effect in "Enter the 37th Chamber" that makes you search your room for the source of a mechanical malfunction. Ultimately, the score for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem isn't just irritating music in general, it makes for a piss-poor film score in a functional sense. At the time of its debut, Reznor had pontificated, "The importance of music - or lack of importance of music - in today's world, from my perspective, is a little defeating." Few film scores are as pointlessly defeating as this one, and, if not for the marginal character cues, it would achieve the worst rating possible.  *   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Total Time: 51:01