Catharsis was a mysterious foreign band when I saw them in Belgium together with Driven, Reveal, Spirit Of Youth and 25 Ta Life if memory serves well. Their first full-length is now on my turntable for the first time. The band was long buried in my mind since that performance.

But while trying to build up a decent collection of Good Life Recordings I came across their record on that label. Good Life Recordings was the label that took care of the vinyl version and the Anarchist Punk label Crimeth Inc. did the CD version. It was in the year 1997 that the record was released.

When listening to the record now I can appreciate it. It’s quite diverse in music, long songs packed with riffs, spoken parts, chaotic parts, metallic stir. All very much representative for that era in Hardcore’s history. I think the drummer Alexei D. Rodriguez does his act in this very well also.

As you can see, the cover is quite basic black matte with a male body on the right side, don’t know what it symbolizes but one could easily think it’s the body of Christ given the biblical imagery abundance on Good Life covers. But I’m not sure of this.

Anyway there are emotional parts also on the record and the beginning intro is also very nice to hear. A clean female voice, I’ve a soft spot for that.

Check the NO GODS, NO MASTERS vinyl label

The track listing reveals also their religion inspired song texts. There is no insert that came with this copy. That tells us it is an early copy. What struck me the most about their performance in Bissegem, Belgium was that they were explicitly preaching to be against distros and buying records, pointing at the place in the venue where the merch table was.

Well now these two facts come together, they fact that there were no inserts in the record was actually the reason they were pissed on the distro, Good Life’s to be more precise. The agreements weren’t met, there should have been taken care of the inserts by the band and Crimeth Inc. but Good Life hadn’t received these and started selling the record timely already. That was the reason they were totally mad about that. Funny how 16 years later, the pieces come together.

Anyway, I can’t give a more lyrical insight because this one is an early copy and has no insert. Maybe later when I find a CD format of Samsara…

This record goes for quite a penny on Discogs and is one of the more expensive records of the Good Life catalogue. I found it second hand at Good Life HQ… Also one day I need to do a slight condition upgrade.