Reach Out - s/t 1994

Back in my mid teens, I found myself in my first and last incarnation as a musical purist. From the second half of 8th grade all the way through to the Winter of 10th, the BPMs had to exceed a jillion, the vocals needed to sound excreted, and distortion on the guitars had to be reminiscent of that deafening crunch you that rattles your eardrums whenever you begin chewing a mouthful of corn flakes. It wasn't until I was halfway through my 17th year that I finally began to break from the strict agenda of crust-powerviolence-grind and explore "emo" and its subsets. For whatever reason, I was fascinated by the fact that this recently popularized term was not birthed through ex-mall goths and scenesters, but by the limited creativity punks elicited in dubbing genres over 2 decades ago.
I guess it was probably because I had been feeding the directionless anger of my youthful soul while utterly emaciating my angst, but I took to this stuff with obsessive vigor, and hoarded everything I could find from the first, second, and third waves of the genre. Reach Out's s/t EP was one of the first pieces I picked up, and still one of my absolute favorites.
As Andy Radin put it, these guys play "hardcore emo", which is basically hardcore punk filtered through second wave emo with a lot of pained shrieking, chaos, and melody. It might be easier to hop over to fourfa.com though if you're looking for a more in-depth explanation.
Anyway, Reach Out were a Californian 5-piece that existed between 92' and 93' who ended their career on an incredibly high note with this self-titled posthumous EP. Unlike other bands in the gene pool like Heroin, Coleman, Three Studies For A Crucifixion, and Angel Hair, the discordant, chaotic, essences of the genre (as well the hardcore song structures) were more like mere aspects of Reach Out's style rather than the foundation. There's enough sensory overload here to keep you happy (especially in the vocal department), but disarmament never seems to be the intent of the songs. If anything, the four tracks on here, regardless of length, sound epic and grandiose without ever getting too cheesy and overstated. The vocals are primarily delivered in a desperate rasp, and are accompanied by those super-high pitch squeals (think Venus And Bacchus-era Saetia) we all love, and some clean narrative stuff just to saturate the EPIC aspects.
It's occurring to me now that I definitely don't possess the literary prowess to claim these guys as a hardcore band, then refute the sovereignty of the term to describe these guys properly. Also, that last sentence sounded really pretentious for some reason. Perhaps because it was. Or maybe it just didn't make much sense. Here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?6r46nh4thoqz7c2

This is the rip from the emoisdead mediafire page, but I split up the songs into their intended 4 tracks instead of two. It's definitely the best sounding version I've found, with most of the others completely nullifying the squeaky vocals and burying the narrative portions.

EDIT: Uploaded at last.