I have this immature bias to automatically dislike acoustic guitars, but at the same time I must confess that I like to listen to some Dashboard Confessional stuff, and I don’t care how many scenepoints I lose by admitting it. Anyway, over the years it seems like it’s become obligatory for bands to include one of those songs on their albums and I can’t say I really hate it when they do, but I honestly prefer a slow electric guitarded song above the acoustic tunes.

With “Punk Goes Acoustic”, following up “Punk Goes Metal” and “Punk Goes Pop”, Fearless again managed to gather quite a bunch of great bands. In fact, there’s a couple that I never expected to work on acoustic songs; Thrice, Strung Out, Rise Against and Strike Anywhere are not bands I’d easily associate to laidback music. Except for Rise Against, aforementioned bands have worked on songs that were previously on one of their records. I thought it was quite confusing to hear one of Strung Out’s hardest songs “Velvet Alley” dragging like this, but it’s quite OK.

Overall though, I think that the best songs are those that I didn’t hear before, and as far as I know they were especially written for this occasion. I’m talking about Yellowcard, Sugarcult, The Starting Line, Rise Against, Coalesce and Grade. Yellowcard because of the still charming violin, Sugarcult because of the hit-potential and the nice vocals, The Starting Line for being the most catchy of all, together maybe with Rise Against’s song that features guest vocals by Bill Stevenson. Coalesce was a band I only knew by name, but they deliver a different, darker, more complex yet entertaining song. Finally there’s Grade with a bit of a tougher approach than the overall sound on this comp thanks to the backing vocals.

Honorable mentionings for bands that have worked on earlier released songs go to Noise Ratchet, the only band that has female input in the backing vocals. Kris Roe (Ataris) still has one of the most appealing voices in this scene to me and of course I couldn’t forget mentioning Midtown, still one of the best in the vocal business, although I really couldn’t make up which of the three guys is singing here.

Unfortunately there’s also some really bad songs on here, and it’s mostly the bad, dare I say out-of-tune vocals, that are to blame (what else could go wrong with an acoustic song really?) Maybe the guys singing in Finch, Taking Back Sunday and From Autumn To Ashes sound quite good when backed up by electric loudness, but they really have trouble keeping a solid tone here I think. And it’s quite painful of course when this occurs when all you hear is a guitar and a singer.

I’d say this comp is amazing for the big names that are on it, and I’m convinced many people will be tempted to buy it, because some of their favorite bands are on it. But in the end there’s none but three songs that I really thought were very good (i.e. Rise Against, Sugarcult and The Starting Line). There’s a bunch of OK songs as well, but in the end that won’t be enough for me to break out of this lazy and bored feeling I get when listening to it for more than 76 minutes. I look at it as a nice gadget but I prefer most of these bands in their normal habitat.