Record Label: Sub City Records
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Take Action! is and organization that seeks to reach out and provide help to youth who may be feeling depressed, unwanted and suicidal. Sub City Records founded the Take Action! tour a few years back in order to take action and bring attention to the high suicide rate among young adults. Over the years, the Take Action! tour and the CD compilation has successfully raised thousands of dollars for various charities and organizations. Volume 5 is a two-disc compilation consisting of forty-three bands with a handful of unreleased tracks. As with all of the other Take Action! comps, a percentage of the proceeds go towards youth organizations.

The Take Action! disc is for a great cause, but personally I have never been too fond of the selection of bands for the compilations in the past. Volume 5 isn’t too far off. It seems that most of the bands are categorized and split up between the two discs. Disc one seems to consist mostly of the more popular and trendy emo-style rock bands that you would find on Fuse or the cover of Alternative Press while the second disc has much more variety and depth and has a more underground punk/indie rock sound to it. I preferred the second disc by far.

Disc One
Most of the bands on the first disc would never be part of my day-to-day musical repertoire. I’m just not a fan of the whiny screamo stuff. That’s basically the entire disc up until about the 18th song. Then it switches over to some hardcore/metal/screamo stuff. Yeah what a weird combination, metal spikes and black-rimmed glasses…those go together like tuna and candy canes. Little to say, disc one was less than memorable and more like forgettable. There was a decent track from Nural that stood out.

Disc Two
The selection of bands on the second disc was more along my tastes. I thought there was more variety and some good quality tracks from bands that I’m familiar with such as Against Me!, Lagwagon, the Dropkick Murphy’s, the Horrorpops, and Maxeen. As I mentioned before, I’m more of a Hellcat/Fat Wreck Chords kinda guy than a Fearless/Fueled By Ramen guy. Disc one and disc two were like night and day. There were a few less than appetizing tracks on this CD as well, but in this case the good outweighed the bad.

I would have to say that I probably won’t find myself listening to either one of these discs much since I have most of the stuff from the bands that I liked on here and I probably won’t be attending the tour due to the lousy selection of bands that make up the line up, but I have great respect for the cause that it seeks to bring light to. For anyone that is just beginning to dabble in the underground music scene, there are a lot of bands to choose from on this compilation (maybe too many) and I’m sure that there would be something on here for just about anyone. If you are already into the bands that are participating in the Take Action! tour, then please go and support a good cause by attending one of the shows.

Bottom Line:
Notable Tracks: Dropkick Murphy’s-The Warrior’s Code, Against Me!-Don’t Lose Touch, Horrorpops-Where You Can’t Follow, Solea-Leaving Today, Maxeen-Lead Not Follow, Nural-Chasing You
Overall Rating: