Our Future is Looking Bleak

Originally self-released in 2000, Blind Society's Our Future Is Looking Bleak was reissued by Blackout Records in 2003 as a companion to the group's second album, 2002's Contrary To Popular Belief. These 15 songs (in under 24 minutes!) are straight-up hardcore in the classic style, with only one song, the strident "Working Class Enemy," breaking the two-minute mark. The band is old-school enough to punctuate songs with "Oi! Oi! Oi!" choruses, and start pretty much every track exactly the same way, in the grand hardcore tradition (they even title one song "Two Minutes Hate," in belated homage to George Orwell's 1984), but while they perform the songs with immense power and authority, the songs themselves rarely rise above the "one-and-a-half chords in one-and-a-half minutes" credo of standard-issue hardcore. In the end, Our Future Is Looking Bleak isn't bad enough to warrant snide jokes about the album title, but it's pretty much strictly for hardcore's less discerning fans. ~ Stewart Mason