What's (Re)New? — Pain Of Mind by Neurosis

A few days ahead of its scheduled reissue, Neurosis' 1987 debut LP, Pain Of Mind, is currently streaming at the group's Bandcamp site and pre-order links for the physical releases, which include color options for vinyl, are available at Neurot Recordings. 

Highly anthemic, raw, and certainly energized, Pain Of Mind precedes the band's first actual steps toward the path that Neurosis would eventually cut for themselves, pioneering a version of metal music that investigated how sound could be explored and the treasures those deep recesses could hold.  Released at a time when hardcore was going through its midlife crisis, faced with either the possibility of growing musically or staying the course, Pain Of Mind is itself a crossover release, musically ahead of the lockstep one-two punch typified by hardcore's highest esteemed while adhering to the genre's speed, song length economy and aggression.  It's a blistering listen.  

Pain Of Mind will be out May 25th via Neurot Recordings. 

If you're interested, you can find reviews for other Neurosis reissues here:

• A 2011 review of Souls At Zero and the Sovereign EP

• A 2010 review of Enemy of the Sun

All info and links were provided by the excellent and always accommodating Earsplit PR. 

NEUROSIS: Remastered/Reissued Pain Of Mind Debut LP Streaming In Full; Album Out Friday Via Neurot Recordings

Photos by Murray Bowles

Neurot Recordings presents the remastered reissue of NEUROSIS' debut album, Pain Of Mind. The album is streaming in its entirety ahead of its re-release this Friday, May 25th.

Stream NEUROSIS' remastered reissue Pain Of Mind debut LP HERE.

NEUROSIS' Pain Of Mind is set to be re-released alongside CHRIST ON PARADE's A Mind Is A Terrible Thing full-length. Both initially released in 1987, these two albums will see a simultaneous worldwide reissue on LP, CD, and digital formats on May 25th. The artwork for Pain Of Mind has been updated by Josh Graham (A Storm Of Light) in the tradition of the previously-reissued NEUROSIS titles, and the album has been remastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering.

Find preorders HERE, and the 1987 bundle with NEUROSIS' Pain Of Mind and CHRIST ON PARADE's A Mind Is A Terrible Thing HERE.

—
Pain of mind, sickness of heart...

Pain Of Mind marks the inception of one of the weirdest and most powerful bands there ever was as they begin their odyssey through the sonic landscape: thirty-three years, eleven albums and counting. These gritty punk songs bear little resemblance to what NEUROSIS would become, but the future was written here, and if you listen closely to these kids – barely out of high school at the time, you can hear their early influences: The guitars and existential anguish of Amebix and Rudimentary Peni, the passionate politics of Crass, the heaviness of Sabbath – and here, too, they lay the foundation for some of their enduring concerns: the pursuit of transcendence, and contemplation on the downward suck of despair.

As Ian MacKaye coyly suggests in the East Bay Punk doc Turn It Around, there are "a lot of holes to fall into" growing up in the Bay Area. In 1987 Dave Edwardson was eighteen, Scott Kelly was nineteen, Jason Roeder was sixteen, Chad Salter, the band elder, was twenty-one, and they had already fallen into many of them, including, of course, the great abyss of depression. Only a teenager could write the punk anthems "Black," "Grey," "Life On Your Knees," and of course the title track, "Pain Of Mind." They are songs of survival.

With Pain Of Mind, NEUROSIS sunk their claws into the hearts and minds of the East Bay scene like no one else. They were fucking dark, gazing right into the abyss and refusing to turn away. The cacophony of vocals on Pain Of Mind – Scott's unhinged screams, and Dave's guttural growl, suggested a familiar sort of internal mania: like the voices in an unquiet mind, paranoid, but for all the right reasons. And Jason Story's original cover art perfectly captures that torment.

NEUROSIS shows in the Pain Of Mind-era were like nothing else. The pit was wild; people rolled around on the floor, climbed the walls, threw themselves off the stage. Watching Neurosis play felt like a seizure that reset your brainwaves: shock treatment, an exorcism. For a few days after a show, you always felt real mellow.

NEUROSIS reminded us that maybe we weren't free, but at least we were locked up together. It sounds melodramatic, but NEUROSIS might have saved our lives. -- Anna Brown

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Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead