Putting a compilation album must be a bit like sending your octuplets off to school separately and seeing which one gets picked on first, Especially when every one of them is ‘different’. There’s 12 bands on this comp, some familiar and some not – you know Dumb Instrument, Mouse Eat Mouse, Commander Keen and Cayto so we can get them out of the way, all pretty much in the “pass with distinction” pile. 96 Tears, who open this album, seem like bog-standard baggy electro,but recorded in such a echoey bassy environment that they somehow get away with it. A+E Line are perhaps that example of’special’ child, lyrically weird, they may be open to a restraining order from the subject of ‘Christopher Walken’ simply for having written it. Stick Finlays are one of maybe 6 Scottish bands and despite never setting the heather on fire, perhaps their highly-charged brand of emo sees them reach a high point on this release. Ormondroyd make decent Muse-y epic rock, Stop It You’re Killing Me is like Devo and Franz with a bad attitude, Simon Heartfield’s homespun electro is charmingly all over the place. Bone Machine’s industrio-pop is perhaps the only track to struggle to muster pass marks, , but like Toupe with their menacing twin-bass attack, it’s not actually bad. Faint praise, but how often can do you hear a compilation with nary a bad track on it – and when you balance that against the half-dozen genuinely impressive acts on here, you can see that Hackpen must be very proud partents indeed.
