V/A - Hollywood Rocks! The Audio Companion

*=Staff's pick

Genre	Hollywood Hard Rock	-	Vocals
Tracks	78	-	Guitar
Runningtime	330 Min.	-	Guitar
Label	Cleopatra Records	-	Bass
Release	21 June 2005	-	Drums
Country	USA	-	Keyboards
Similar artists	---

This is purely a chest of gold for those of you who are in to this kind of music. Four discs containing five and a half hours of music from the Hollywood scene with bands like Dokken, W.A.S.P., L.A. Guns, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bang Tango, Great White, Warrant and a whole bunch of more bands - in total you get 78 tracks with bands that are well known and some bands that are not as known. This collection is set to accompany the book with the same name that was released earlier and which covers the decadent times of the club scene in Los Angeles in the eighties and early nineties.

Each one of the four albums cover an aspect in time and is divided into the early 80's, the mid/late 80's, the late 80's and the early 90's so you pretty much get all you need to remember those times. Even if I wasn't any of the bigger fans of this scene, it is amusing to see all of the bands that are featured and to remember some of them which I was listening to when I was a little kid and started to find out more about hard rock. Practically every band I know from this time is represented on the albums and there are also a lot of bands that I previously haven't heard and further more a bunch that I haven't even heard of before. And there are probably bands missing that ought to be on the albums but none that I can spontaneously point out with one major exception: Guns 'n' Roses. They became the biggest band and their importance to the hard rock world is not to be taken lightly. To leave them out is to make this compilation incomplete if you ask me.

The quality of some of the songs could have been better, the tracks are re-mastered but nevertheless some of them don't sound to be. All recordings all original ones and it appears to be that none are album tracks and instead the collection consists of demo-recordings, live versions, b-sides, alternate takes and out of print collectables and that might explain the quality of some of the recordings despite the re-mastering.

This review is based on a 17 track sampler that I received but to write this as a ordinary review is hopeless anyway, in that case I would have to be handing out chalices to every single band on the album and there is no way in hell that I would do that. So the number of chalices is to be taken with a pinch of salt, as I am myself not that fond of this kind of bands even if there is a few that I hold close. But for one with a bigger interest than me this collection ought to be indispensable.

Production	Vocals	Compositions
-	-	-

Summary
4 chalices of 10 - Thomas