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Various
Artists: This Is Bad Taste Vol. 5
Sweden, the land of ironic mustaches and the Mecca of new and exciting rock n roll has birthed a wonderful, young label called Bad Taste. Bad Taste Records recently packaged up a nice little album featuring eight of the bands on its current roster. There are a total of sixteen tracks on the entire thing which comes to two songs per artist. For the first half of the record, each band showcases one of their newer tracks, and for the last half, they offer older tracks from previous albums. So, in a sense, you get two different faces of each band, a nice little marketing decision that helps out the buyer. The bands are pretty much all over the board, ranging from bluesy garage swagger to pretty soundscapes, and then back to tongue-in-cheek punkiness. Since there are only eight bands, Ill run through them all: The first band up, Danko Jones, puts on a good soulful garage act. The guitars are the catching point for this band, which plays really chunky blues garage with a metally, fast edge to it. To me, that is the best asset of this band, as the lyrics took a bit to warm up to; but all in all, this is good music. Four Square is melodic, anthemic punk pop with great, snide lyrics. This ridiculously catchy song Hitmaker is all about stealing song ideas and riffs and putting them together for the newest, greatest pop song of the week; and now I cant get it out of my head. The next band up, Logh, is phenomenal. I was so happy to see that Danny Rowe agreed with me in his review of their EP last week on LOTD. The song, The Contractor and the Assassin, is perfectly solid and powerful. It reminds me a bit of Shudder to Think, but it is entirely dark, beautiful, strong and exciting at the same time. Definitely hear this song, even if that means downloading it. All Systems Go is pretty standard pop punk that is a bit reminiscent of Fountains of Wayne. It has nice synth-backed bridges into grand power-chord choruses. Last Days of April is pretty good; while the song is a bit drony and lengthy, it emerges as mellow and soothing. The song is pretty spacey with an almost shoegazer quality. The Satanic Surfers are semi-political old Epitaph-style punk rock. Theyve got that Bad Religion vocal style and mindset. The Langhorns sound how I thought the Satanic Surfers would sound: old retro surf punk. This is Swedish instrumental surf at its finest! Brilliant! On one of the tracks, theres an Ennio Morricone dark western influence bended throughout very interesting. Last but not least, we have the old geeky punk-poppers, The Hard-Ons. These tracks are a little more subdued than I was expecting; the vocals are slow and brightly sung overtop loudly distorted, chunky power chords. Always good. This is definitely a solid comp worth checking into. Buy it, and learn some Swedish history.
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