V/A Hey Fuck You Compilations, Vol. 2 cassette
Dating back to my early years of getting into underground music, coming across a sampler for an unknown record label with the music they’ve released has remained one of my favorite things—what a simple and easy way to discover a bunch of new music. Hey Fuck You! Records out of Arkansas has been cranking out releases for the past three-and-a-half years. Scrolling through the lot of them, the only ones I had previously been aware of were LACK OF INTEREST, who seem to have re-released cassettes from their discography on the label, and HUMAN, who are a modern powerviolence band whose debut tape I was sent to review when it first came out. HUMAN kicks off the sampler, and their track is immediately followed by a modern pop punk band, BLANKET OF M. I made the connection right away to the old Skull Duggery 10” compilation, Fallen Upon Deaf Ears, a really cool comp that put extreme music powerhouses like NAUSEA and DROPDEAD side-by-side with nasty pop punk acts of the time like SCREECHING WEASEL and the VINDICTIVES. I picked up a copy of that comp years ago and always thought it was a really unique concept, reminding punks that for all the subgenre nitpicking we tend to do, things are actually far more closely related than we may give them credit for at a glance. That memory ended up being the best thing I got out of this tape sampler. Most of the tracks here are some variation of modern powerviolence and extreme music, which is generally what I had expected. It was the attempts to push beyond that sound that left me more than underwhelmed. The over-five-minute nü-metal track by MINDROTT, the novelty modern pop punk tracks with phony-baloney angry vocals by RADICAL FUN TIME, and the sloppy street punk song by RIVER CITY REJECTS getting chopped abruptly short make the whole compilation feel less like a curated introduction to a record label and more like someone just haphazardly threw a bunch of songs onto a tape. By the time this cassette compilation came to an end, I had started to wonder if I should have paid closer attention to its title. Perhaps it was meant as a warning.