Various – We Reach: The Music Of The Melvins

I find it impossible to summarize this record as a whole. Its parts are too disparate.

1. Mare - Night Goat: They seem to have missed the letter that explained that these are covers for a Melvins cover record and not original tracks for a pseudo avant-garde college compilation. Good recording/engineering though.

2. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Honey Bucket: This is just plain sloppy, missing rhythmic patterns and in a few cases adding or dropping beats. Sounds thin and hollow.

3. Mastodon - The Bit: Not bad at all. A well done, faithful cover.

4. Strapping Young Lad - Zodiac: A little overproduced for my taste, and their choice of root-fifth-octave instead of the original root-octave jump is odd. A bit theatrical, overall middling; the Brutal Truth cover of this song is much better.

5. Pig Destroyer - Claude: Please return to practicing in the basement until you can learn to all hit a beat at the same time. Thanks.

6. High on Fire/Keelhaul - Oven: Decently played instruments; I am not a fan of the liberties that have been taken with the vocals. Middling production.

7. Meatjack - Shevil: Not all bad but completely lacks the sparseness of the original, which I felt was its best quality. If this was toned down a notch or two it would be much better.

8. Strapadon Factory - Joan of Arc: Finally someone chose to go really heavy with the right song. Rather over-compressed though.

9. Isis/Agoraphobic Nosebleed - Boris: I find it hard to believe that this is really Isis. The guitars sound like a vacuum cleaner. It's a very faithful cover but once again has lost the sparsity of the original.

10. Absentee - Revolve: That vocalist's voice...not my cup of tea, but this is how to do a note-perfect cover. Seriously, they have my commendation for being absolutely spot-on.

11. Eyehategod - Easy As It Was: I would have enjoyed this cover as an instrumental, and if it was not recorded on a boombox.

12. Dog Fashion Disco - Anaconda: They have utterly destroyed a classic. No words can describe how truly awful this is.

13. Disengage - Raise a Paw: Someone should let these folks in on the miracles of 1. bass frequencies and 2. drum mics. Otherwise well played, though the growl of the original's vocals is totally absent.

14. Blessing the Hogs - Hog Leg: Congratulations on turning a great song into repetitive commercial-metal crap.

15. CKY/Gnarkill - Laughing with Lucifer at Satan's Sideshow: They should have stolen the original's samples; it would have been perfect. I really want to believe that this was the version that the Melvins wrote, but they recorded the version on Honky to be purposefully less accessible.

16. Maritime Murder - Copache: Not bad at all. All around a well played, faithful cover from the entire band.

17. Made Out of Babies - Bar-X the Rocking M: Better production would have made this totally amazing. Makes for a rare good lower-fi/lower-budget version of a Melvins track. It makes me want to see this band live.

18. Pincer 2 - Echohead/Don't Piece Me: It's as if the band from Track 1 woke up and realized that they needed to to a Melvins cover. Still awful.