Cro-Mags question

Does anyone have their "Near Death Experience" album? If you do what is your opinion of it?

I had it at one time but not anymore. I can't really remember what was on it. Obviously to me it didn't really stand out as anything special. It proabaly had one or two strong tracks and that was it.

Basically along the lines of the one before it Alpha Omega. now that I think of it they even had one song that appeared on both of them.

chucksteak wrote:

I had it at one time but not anymore. I can't really remember what was on it. Obviously to me it didn't really stand out as anything special. It proabaly had one or two strong tracks and that was it.

Basically along the lines of the one before it Alpha Omega. now that I think of it they even had one song that appeared on both of them.

I had it on cassette in high school but never got the cd version.

ah I had it on CD. I found it used and very cheap back in the late 90s but I turned around and sold it soon after. Like I said I can't really remember much about it so I was thinking it was just ok.

Found a bleak review for the album.

Cro-Mags Near Death Experience Release Date: 1993 09 28 Label: Century Rating:

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 hardcore 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 the Cro-Mags' 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 The Age of Quarrel troika representation before another breakup led to six years of inactivity. It's often assumed that the teaming of Flanagan and Joseph was key to the band's early success, but careful credit inspection reveals guitarist Parris Mayhew's significant music-writing contributions on The Age of Quarrel and Best Wishes, clearly the Cro-Mags' best and most influential recordings. Although Flanagan and Joseph muster a little of the old-time magic, Mayhew's absence is noticeable from Near Death Experience. 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 clichés and never reaches the level of musical intensity fans of Mayhew-era recordings will expect. The already low creative standard of Near Death Experience reaches its nadir as Joseph 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 metal chunking of "The Other Side of Madness." Flanagan and company salvage a few decent tracks like the epic "Time I Am" and "Say Good-Bye to Mother Earth," keeping Near Death Experience 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 hardcore fire. Vincent Jeffries, All Music Guide

Tracks:

	Title	Composer	Time
1	Say Good-Bye to Mother Earth	Cro Mags, Joseph
2	Kali-Yuga	Cro Mags, Joseph
3	War on the Streets	Cro Mags, Joseph
4	Death in the Womb	Cro Mags, Joseph
5	Time I Am	Cro Mags, Joseph
6	Reflections	Cro Mags, Joseph
7	Near Death Experience	Cro Mags, Joseph
8	Other Side of Madness [Rat Soup Version]	Cro Mags, Flanagan

I liked it but it was pretty much some killer, some filler type of album. Death in the womb is a weird like anti abortion song.