Let's get one thing straight right now - compilations are 99% worthless. It's bad enough that most of the time bands choose to do covers of songs that have already been done in the past and more likely than not were much better than the given rehashed cover version this newer band has thrown in your face. Compilations are even worse, because instead of one band doing one lame cover tune, you have 15-30 bands doing 15-30 lame cover tunes with a bare minimum that are actually listenable. Now, Century Media deserves a bit of leeway here - after all, they're one of the most respectable labels in all of Metal with a pretty powerful roster, and they've been helping keep our beloved scene alive for 20 solid years; so absolute props to them regardless. However...when considering all of the great things this label has done for the Metal world, this compilation is not one of them. Being around for 20 years is great, but having bands that are mostly newer to the label covering songs from bands that used to be (or in some cases still are) on the label...meh, not so much. Whether it's a steaming pile of a song, a rancid, worthless band, or just a poor match between song and band, for the most part it just does not work.

Take disc one for example: 16 songs total; two great songs, four decent songs, and 10 that are absolute garbage. The great songs - ARCH ENEMY's cover of DREAM EVIL's "The Book Of Heavy Metal" and DARK TRANQUILLITY's version of SENTENCED's "Broken" are a given. With the one exception of MEGADETH's "Symphony Of Destruction", ARCH ENEMY seems to be able to take anybody's song and absolutely ravage it. And DARK TRANQUILLITY are so good they can take a rather lame band like SENTENCED and make one of their songs surprisingly likeable. KRISIUN and GRAVE squeeze in at decent because even though the songs are somewhat weak, the bands delivering them are not. MAROON throw SAMAEL's legendary "Baphomet's Throne" into hyper speed, rendering it nearly unrecognizable, but salvaging just enough of the song's inherent groove to make it listenable. And WATCH THEM DIE squeeze their way in strictly on the fact that they were smart enough to basically leave BLOODBATH's "Breeding Death" the way it should be. The rest - forget about it. Bad bands, bad songs, bad pairings, or all of the above ruin it.

Disc two at least makes a better meal from the menu on hand. FIREWIND will stun you with how well they pull off NEVERMORE's "Believe In Nothing", acoustics, vocals et al. Irony rears its head with ARCH ENEMY covering DREAM EVIL on disc one, with the opposite occurring on disc two; but ARCH ENEMY is capable of what DREAM EVIL is not, so this side of the fence just tanks. Power Metal ARCH ENEMY? No, not happening. THE FORSAKEN give proper respect to GRAVE's "You'll Never See", and placing OLD MAN'S CHILD's "Doommaker" in the hands of the zany kooks known as ZIMMER'S HOLE is a gift from god. In the cases of DEVIAN with MORGOTH's "Isolated" and ABORTED with TURMOIL's "Playing Dead", you've got great bands pulling off decent versions of mildly decent tunes. But once again, the fun stops there. And a first class middle finger to MANNTIS (featuring IN THIS MOMENT, for whatever the hell that's worth) for reducing LACUNA COIL's usually beautiful "Heaven's A Lie" to an utter train wreck of unrecognizable carnage and unlistenable garbage. Fact is, in the case of both discs, half of these bands either don't deserve to be covered or to be covering, period.

Granted, when you have 32 bands covering songs from 31 other bands, opinions will without doubt vary. The key moral here is to be wary. If you happened to visit Century Media Europe's MySpace page once a week for the past several weeks, you'll have a good idea, as they rotated new songs in regularly. Otherwise, you'd be all the wiser to try to find at least some song samples before you risk your hard earned dough on this two disc set. Best bet: find the ones you like and buy them individually on the net. There's just no justifying this entire compilation as a quality purchase.