Various Artists - The Best of Taste of Chaos

The Taste of Chaos tour attempts to bring together some of the most bands of the post-emo-hardcore spectrum. Despite only featuring about eight bands on the tour (only five made it to the local version which just recently hit our country), The Best of Taste of Chaos gathers forty bands together on two discs. And it does a surprisingly good job of giving an overview of the current state within these related sub-genres.

Loosely split into the more poppy bands (disc one) and the harder edge (disc two), there is a fair bit of ground covered here. All the bands who made the Australian Taste of Chaos are present, such as The Used, Story of The Year, Killswitch Engage, Funeral for a Friend and Rise Against, but some of the bands from the US tour such as Atreyu and My Chemical Romance are absent. Matchbook Romance provide the most emo moment with the mainly acoustic In Transit, but things are mixed up a bit with tracks like Our Time is Now from Story of The Year who combine the emocore verses with an eighties hard rock aesthetic in the choruses and riffing. They also put on one of the best visual performances at the tour, but seem a little lacking without this on disc.

From First to Last’s Note to Self is a nice little catchy ditty, with some heavy kick thrown in at the end to raise things. But to be honest just about every track on disc one has a chorus with the potential to get stuck in your head. Thursday’s contribution is a touching contemplation about life in a world obsessed with the terrorist threat. It’s clear that they have many of the same influences as the other bands that surround them, but there’s something about the way they combine them in War All The Time which makes it the stand out track on disc one and shows off the musical understanding of the band.

Disc two kicks off with the heavy assault of Avenged Sevenfold, Killswitch Engage, Every Time I Die and Shadows Fall all in a row. Every Time I Die’s Kill The Music is probably the best example of what’s in store with this disc: more growling, harder drumming and more technical guitar work. And I have to admit at this stage I got more excited about disc two than I had been about disc one. Norma Jean also offer Bayonetwork which is another slice of heavier, less straightforward music and quite impressive. Oddly enough Saosin provide the only live track for a release that’s supposed to celebrate a tour.

With a compilation which relies so much on the genre relation to bring all these bands together, it’s not surprising that some of them start to sound the same (remember, there’s forty bands on this disc). But there are a few surprises lying around still. The Dillinger Escape Plan provide us with Unretrofied, which is almost the inverse of the typical hardcore song. Uncharacteristically catchy for the band and featuring harmonies and synths, it switches around in the middle to give us a dose of distortion, odd chords and screams, then go back to where we started. Opiate for The Masses bring a bit of breakbeat electronic drumming into their mix, while Chariot add a bit of dark metal to their hardcore sound and some grind style vocals, And Then Came Them is possibly one of the darkest songs here.

But the most different is closer Flaco 81 by the Street Drum Corps, a rhythmic percussive piece featuring drums of many types and some really interesting rhythms. It’s a change from the rest, but still retains the same headspace as everything that’s come before it, and thus makes a nice way to end out the set.

(Originally published on FasterLouder)