Various Artists – The Best Of Taste Of Chaos

“Best Of” cds are always highly critiqued – because really who picks them? Normally, its the head honcho being the record label, picking the band’s most popular and easily accessible songs to slap together to make an easy selling mix CD, when really its the fans who should be picking the track listing. But this CD brings up an even more definite question: what he hell if it the best of?

The 36 song CD may be called The Best of Taste Of Chaos, but what does that mean? Only a handful of these bands were actually on last year’s tour, and even less are on this year’s tour. So it’s clear thatWarcon are just going for the name recognition here, but really, the label has already beaten that to a bloody pulp with a live DVD, a live CD, the Taste Of Christmas (which is a good compilation and I still suggest buying it) along with the tour itself. You’d think the mastermind behind the annual Vans Warped Tour would be able to come up with a better idea for a name, but I guess not.

Anyway, back to the CD. What exactly is it the best of? We’ve already cancelled off the possibility of it being the tour, so I guess we’ll have to go with the label’s description for it: the most definitive post-hardcore collection to ever be assembled. Which, I guess could be a slightly accurate description, but is in all honesty very exaggerated.

For this is far from being the “most definitive post-hard collection ever assembled” – mainly because you’ve heard every single one of these songs before. The only relatively new songs are Billy Talent‘s Red Flag (which is widely accessible throughout the internet and was already released on a the Black By Popular Demand compilation this past summer) and Underoath‘s I’ve Got Ten Friends And A Crowbar That Says You Won’t Do Jack which has also previously seen the light of day on b-sides and compilations. Of course, Street Drum Corps‘ addition of Flaco 81 is a new one that we haven’t heard before.

The remaining thirty four tracks are just as easy to acquire, most of them being singles that you can download for free through the band’s and label’s web sites. On top of that, many of them aren’t even new.Matchbook Romance‘s In Transit For You was released over two years ago and Thrice‘s Stare At The Sun came from The Artist In The Ambulance. When people dish out their hard-earned cash, they want to hear new songs they haven’t heard before, not just popular singles for the masses.

There’s not doubt that this will sell fairly well. Fans will get excited for the new tour, see the name splattered across the front (with the same design as always), flip to the back and see names like Thursday, Funeral For A Friend, The Used, Alexisonfire, Rise Against (how they fit in this mix I have no idea), Avenged Sevenfold and Bleed The Dream and they’ll instantly be excited.

So I guess Lynman was right: name recognition does work.