NEXT2NOTHING - To Have Courage, But No Conscience 7" +

1996 and Pants were baggy, mosh was hard, breaks were fast, shit was talked, backs were stabbed, bonds were broken. These were during those years before Hatebreed breakdowns and kids still danced when the music was fast. Our town actually had a scene for a minute. All the Detroit venues got shut down, so N2N started booking the shows at their house and all the Detroit folk would come and it actually seemed like a scene for about a year. I was in the periphery. I still am. I like it that way.

"To Have Courage..." was Next2Nothing's only release. It was a clusterfuck. Among other things, the recording was pretty tinny, the covers didn't get made until a year and a half after the vinyl was pressed, and by that time, the thanks list was totally obsolete. Still, it is what it is and it is a moment in time.

An ex member gave me a copy of the 7" just recently and kicked me some rips of the tracks. There are 4 additional songs from a later recording session that pretty much smoke the 7" tracks. I only have the digital tracks though, and they were ripped at 128 by someone other than myself. The sound can't be helped much really even if they were 320. The band had a couple of recording sessions that never got released and everything I heard was ridiculously good. I wish someone would collect the original masters and get all that shit mastered, if only for people who remember because it was surprisingly good and has held up well over the years. For the time, they got pretty far, playing with most of the second tier metalcore and hardcore bands of the day on numerous tours. N2N had their own thing going on. Speed, breakdowns, hooks, straightforward (yet well written) lyrics, heart, ambition. There really aren't many bands to compare these guys too because once again, they didn't fit in any sub-genre very well. Too fast for metalcore, too hardcore to be POST hardcore, too negative to be posi, too metal to be youth crew, not fast enough to be thrashcore, not political at all, and they weren't ridiculous enough to be "Holy Terror" hardcore. Midwest negative hardcore. You understand if you are from one of these industrial wasteland megapolii that are closing up for business as we speak. It's the same sort of muck and filth that set the Cuyahoga on fire and spawned Cleveland hardcore. N2N ultimately were a footnote, and should have been more