Earlier today I started thinking about how annoying those stickers at the top of all of Victory Records' releases are. They compare the band that they're trying to sell to bands and genres that don't even come close. For example on the Black Maria's sticker it reads: "For fans of Muse, AFI and The Used!" But The Black Maria sounds like some cookie cutter late 90's rock band like Third Eye Blind.
Lately, Victory has probably committed more crimes than Drive Thru, Vagrant, and Fat put together. For one thing, Victory's growing roster has an uneven ratio of listenable bands to bands that should be considered musical atrocities. Let's look at the list....
Good bands currently on Victory:
- Spitalfield
- Straylight Run
- Darkest Hour
- Bayside
- Smoking Popes (this is questionable since they've yet to put something out on the label and all their good stuff was on Capitol anyway)
Here's a list of the crap bands on Victory:
- Atreyu
- Aiden
- Bury Your Dead
- Action Action
- A Perfect Murder
- Waterdown
- The Black Maria
- The Forecast
- Hawthorne Heights
- June
- The Audition
- The Junior Varsity
- Scars Of Tomorrow
- The Hurt Process
- The Tossers
Man, my fingers are starting to ache, typing all those bands out. But you can see my point. Don't get me wrong, there's some Victory releases in my shelf at home, but they're either something that's fucking incredible (Thursday) or something I got for free (Silverstein). It just seems at some point they just stopped caring, or at least started to care about money rather than the message. Early Victory bands such as Earth Crisis, Snapcase, Hatebreed, Grade, and Boy Sets Fire were actually good. They were politically and socially meaningful. Even an "emo" band like Grade stood on a higher platform than some of that wack sing/scream shit that Victory is releasing these days. It's just disgusting.
I hope that some day Victory Records stops becoming a money making machine for someone's townhouse in Chicago and becomes a real record label again.
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