Various Artists – Bands You Love, Have Heard Of, And Should Know

There is a never ending flow of compilations being flooded into the market these days. Some of bad, some are good, and some are great. But it gets hard to determine which compilations you should pick up from the store during your weekly CD shopping spree. But when two big names like Drive-Thru Records and PureVolume.com come together to release a compilation, you know it’s going to be good.

Like a few compilations lately, Bands You Love, Have Heard Of, And Should Know is embracing the technology age we live in. Each disk comes with an added 60 MP3 songs along with the regular track listing. This adds a lot more depth to the compilation. Sure, you may only be able to listen to it on your computer (unless you burn the mp3s onto another disk), it still makes the albums that much more worthwhile. The 120 bands come from all over, and are both signed and unsigned. Making it so that no matter what, there’s a few bands on here you’ve never heard of before.

For the most part, the bands on the compilation are bands you would expect to hear with Drive-Thru Records. They are pop-punk, but not so poppy that they are overbearing. And with the fact that none of the bands are an extreme change in genre, the compilation flows very nicely.

One of the standout tracks would be Kill The Messenger by Something Corporate‘s front man Andrew McMahon’s side project Jack Mannequin’s. Other memorable tracks are Echo Screen (Rushmore),For Felix (Too Sad For Hollywood), This Day And Age (Second Place Victory), The Maple State (You Can’t Put Two Hotels On Mayfair) and The Prize Fight (The Trainwreck).

Overall, if you are a fan of pop-punk, then this is an compilation for you to pick up. It’s not one of the great ones, but it is good. And with over a hundred bands on it, you will definitely be introduced to bands you normally would never hear.