The pressures of hardcore success and influence took a constant, heavy toll throughout the tumultuous history of
the Cro-Mags
. Shortly after releasing their first (and perhaps the
hardcore
genre's most important) release,
The Age of Quarrel
, the constant personality conflicts and lineup changes began, setting the outfit into a slow, downward, creative spiral. The mixing and matching of New York
veteran musicians was unceasing, and the band never released successive discs with identical lineups. At the eye of the storm, founding member and "The world's first skinhead"
Harley Flanagan
hired and fired almost a dozen musicians (including himself) during
' tumultuous career.
Age of Quarrel
vocalist
John "Bloodclot" Joseph
left the band before the follow-up,
Best Wishes
, only to join up with
Flanagan
years later for two releases, including
Near Death Experience
, giving the disc two-thirds
troika representation before another breakup led to six years of inactivity. It's often assumed that the teaming of
and
Joseph
was key to the band's early success, but careful credit inspection reveals guitarist
Parris Mayhew
's significant music-writing contributions on
, clearly
' best and most influential recordings. Although
muster a little of the old-time magic,
Mayhew
's absence is noticeable from
. While the band's trademark lyrical preoccupations with urban violence and modern man's separation from nature, the past, and spirituality are fully present and accounted for, this 1993 release lumbers through too many bad
metal
cliches and never reaches the level of musical intensity fans of
-era recordings will expect. The already low creative standard of
reaches its nadir as
forces some bad
Steven Tyler
yelping during the
"Mr. Brownstone"
rip-off
"War on the Streets"
and reaches rock bottom again during the
Dokken
-style
chunking of
"The Other Side of Madness."
and company salvage a few decent tracks like the epic
"Time I Am"
"Say Good-Bye to Mother Earth,"
keeping
on rickety life support. Missing the intensity of earlier, better work, this late-career release from the legendary
Cro-Mags
is just a cooling ember, left over from New York's '80s
fire. ~ Vincent Jeffries