REACHING FORWARD

+ RELIEF / ABSIDIA / CLOSELINE

Location: Schorndorf, JuZe Hammerschlag (Germany)

Date: March 16^th 2001

I have been to this cool club lots of times before as you can see in many of my live reviews. But this was the first time I saw some bands play there in the smaller part of the club were usually there’s kind of a café. This is the case when not that many people are attending the show, namely when smaller bands are playing. But this doesn’t mean that the gig was not cool or something. Around 50 people showed up and in this small part of the club it didn’t seem like just a handful of guys hanging around.

Closeline were the first to play. The five piece comes from the Stuttgart area and plays old school hardcore. Nothing outstanding but very entertaining and not worse than other old school bands. During their set some stupid dork tried to pick up a fight, but he could be stopped before anything serious happened and he was thrown out of the club. Violence at shows is not cool but just superfluous and dumb.

Next were Absidia also from the Stuttgart area. On a flyer for that show they were proclaimed as a black metal band. But don’t expect any of that corpsepaint stuff, blood and spikes. I would rather say that Absidia play an ultra aggressive mixture out of new school and some metal elements along with screaming vocals. I didn’t hear anything from this band before, but they’re on Per Koro now, so watch out for a release from these guys if you’re into this aggressive sound. Their show was cool by the way.

The third band arrived much later than expected. Relief from another part of Germany entered the club after waiting for hours on a German highway, took out their gear and began to play. The whole concert had to be done before a certain time, so Relief could only play a handful of songs, but I liked these tracks. Watch out for their split release with Treadmill!

Headlining act tonight were Reaching Forward from Holland. I did an interview with their singer Johnny before the show, and this guy was very nice and a cool person to talk to. He seemed to be a rather quiet person, so I was very surprised to see him explode when Reaching Forward played. The band is doing old school sXe hardcore and they kicked ass! The crowd loved it (me too by the way). Reaching Forward couldn’t play that long, too, but the songs they did were great. They also played two cover songs, the first being “Pushed too far” by Sick of it All (Johnny said this track would be against all this tough guy stupidity), and the second one being a Chain of Strength track if I remember right. After that the show was over. Cool evening, also because smoking was prohibited in the club, hehe…

(Stefan Münch)