DarkCat wrote:
If you knew me in real life you probably would see me picking this from a million miles away. This anthology album is so important to me, and singlehandedly introduced me up to a whole new genre of music. I vaguely heard about Orchid and listened to part of a song when I was in 2007 and hated it. About 2-3 years after that, one summer, I was bored and ended up grabbing this album just to see if anything would change, and it did. I had never listened to anything so powerful, full of raw energy, and emotion before in my life. From the opening riff to "Destination!: Blood" to the heartbreaking and emotional, raw vocals playing over an electric violin at the end of "...And The Cat Turned To Smoke" to the bass line in "The Action Index" and the intense and crushing "Epilogue Of A Carcrash" there is NO dull moment in this. DT!RT! runs just a little over 15 minutes, and Chaos is Me is just about 18 minutes as well, but it all packs a punch. I've been known to spin the record over and over, too.

Orchid could be considered an hodgepodge of genres, but first and foremost the band considers themselves hardcore punk (the label 'screamo' came after and most of the members actually reject it, same with some other veteran bands from the 90s/early 00's scene, which people now refer to as 'skramz'). They also have worked grindcore bands such as Pig Destroyer and Combatwoundedveteran, and even did a Led Zeppelin cover at one point.

I can't talk enough about this band, and all of their albums (not the metal band with the same name though). I really do hope you enjoy it as much as I do and hope it can serve as an introduction to what has quickly become one of my favorite genres (albeit one big misunderstood genre, and I'll always be glad to talk about the band/genre too!).