Taste Of Chaos CD

Brought to you by the same people responsible for summer's annual Warped Tour extravaganza, winter's Taste of Chaos is another Kevin Lyman creation that's pretty much the younger, pissed-off brother of the elder punk-oriented festival. Offering a decidedly harder-edged lineup of bands than Warped, the winter 2004-2005 tour featured such heavy-hitters as Killswitch Engage, Atreyu, the Used, and Unearth, among many other screamo and metalcore-oriented groups represented on this tour compilation disk. However, even with a pretty solid roster of contributors for fans of the punk metal scene of the early 2000s, the record as a whole somehow comes up as pretty unmemorable and inconsistent. It's full of live cuts recorded at different stops along the tour's schedule, so don't get confused when one band is praising New Jersey and the next giving props to Los Angeles. Starting off pretty brash, Killswitch lend a blistering yet melodic cut, while Opiate for the Masses are just plain eerie and Unearth spew pure bile and rage. Soon the bands become less metal, instead drawing from screamo's ranks with random acoustic tracks (representing the tour's acoustic stage, no doubt) popping up every now and again. The latter tracks really only prove that BEDlight for BlueEYES are seemingly the only band present with a singer who can actually sing, though a fair amount of screaming from the group's normal repertoire appears near the song's end. The overall recording leaves much to be desired; the audience is rarely miked, so any response to a request for crowd screams goes largely unnoticed (see Bleed the Dream), and the band vocals on some tracks -- namely Senses Fail -- are barely audible at all. Atreyu appear twice, though only "Right Side of the Bed" is worth one's time; Nicky P.'s acoustic musings are just boring; and Underoath's distraught cut is about as much fun as sticking rusty nails in one's ear. This album is solely for screamo enthusiasts, but even many of them would be better off saving their money to buy a T-shirt at next year's outing instead. ~ Corey Apar

Audio Mixer: Brian Joseph Dobbs.