Reaching Forward - Complete Discography 1998-2000

Reaching Forward is the prime example to why hardcore perplexes me. The genre which punk gave birth to aims to rile energy, spew nihilism and thrive off of spastic anger; yet, much of the subgenre is predictable, stale, boring drivel. Exhibit A: Reaching Forward’s Complete Discography 1998-2000. This now defunct straight-edge hardcore band attempts to scrap together forgotten extras atop their now postmortem career which began in 1995, but fail miserably as every dead end track is a bland, flavorless continuation of the song before it. Each of the thirty-two tracks presented are interchangeable replicas of each other – it’s simply arbitrary to dissect each less-than-two-minute track as this disc is nothing but a monolithic display of what happens to hardcore when given to the wrong heavy-hands. This is simply hardcore lost in a black hole of creativity and astray in inspirational oblivion. And Reaching Forward seem to miss the point: drivel is still drivel whether you play it once or multiply it thirty-two monotonous, boredom-inducing times. [www.reachingxforward.nl]