From Best to Worst: Napalm Death

Harmony Corruption

While I was sufficiently blown away by their earlier work it wasn't until the release of Harmony Corruption that I became a full-fledged, unabashed "fan boy", if you will. Sure, the alienated punk/grindsters will continue to walk around with their nalgas in an uproar due to the lack of micro-songs as a result of some major changes in the line-up but let's face it... ND has over twenty years of playing in this style over their shoulders, so I think it's safe to say that those days are done and over with.

Fear, Emptiness, Despair

As if ND's fascination with Florida and Morrisound Studios wasn't appaling enough to the homo cry-baby's populating the punk/grind scene way back when, Napalm's 5th album 'Fear, Emptiness...' would essentially be the final nail in the coffin for many of these dweebs. Fine by me.

F.E.D. sees the band flirting ever so diligently with industrial and also toning down considerably on the blasts. Sure, there're a few here and there but they serve more to accentuate certain rhythmic passages rather than seek out some juvenile rush via aural shock tactics. Suffice to say that F.E.D. would usher in the somewhat maligned "middle era" of Napalm's career. Some of the hate understandable, some of it not.

Inside the Torn Apart

Here we go with yet another "middle era" ND album that receives a lot of undeserved scorn from the homo punk masses. Sure, album opener 'Breed to Breathe' is a walloping doozy of total gay but each and every track from that point on is pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear from ND after 'Fear, Emptiness...'. Dare-I-say that 'Inside...' is ND's most mature album to date from a songwriter's perspective. Everything on here is quite evenly keeled, including the brutality one would expect from the band. Sure, if you want mindless blasting then perhaps you may want to put it in reverse and go back to 1987-88. Otherwise, 'Inside the Torn Apart' is a pleasant experience that brings to mind guitarist Mitch Harris' short-lived industrial metal project Meathook Seed.

Utopia Banished

Oddly enough, the homo punk/grind masses are known to give this album a pass as it features more blast-beating than 'Harmony Corruption' had. Wow. That's just lame. Oh well...

Blithering redundancies aside, 'Utopia...' certainly feels like an album that's either A) a big 'fuck you' to the naysayers and ship jumpers, or B) some sort of desperate stab at retaining their '80's cred by cutting down on song length and adding in more blasts to appease the ADD masses. Either or, 'Utopia...' is still a punishing experience and perhaps the band's most ambitious album in regards to the amount of riffs flying at you at any given moment. Sort of their 'Time Does Not Heal'.

From Enslavement to Obliteration

Feto sort of takes Scum and reinforces it. The production is ramped. The playing is much tighter and things are a bit more straightforward in regards to going in for the kill. Album opener 'Evolved as One' is a mesmerizing and sludgey "fake-out" before the battering begins. Once that happens, the band pretty much does not let up until album's end.

Mentally Murdered

Sure, I know many (including the band themselves) consider this to be more death than grind but I beg to differ. Obviously the riffs are a bit more varied than what is traditionally considered grindcore but honestly, this sounds like a grip of Feto tracks that didn't make the final cut. Not a bad thing but MM more likely than not sits relatively higher on this list due to nostalgia than it does for my unflinching adoration of its contents.

Scum

A milestone in grindcore and in all likelihood the most important album of that genre. Great for a rush and at this point the occasional walk down memory lane but I was glad that they let up on the shock tactics with the release of 'Harmony Corruption'.

Enemy of the Music Business

Heralded as the band's "return to form" after the trio of albums that comprised the reviled "mid-era", 'Enemy of the Music Business' in many ways is the last stage of the original Napalm sound. Correction... original Mk III Napalm sound. After this album there's something about their sound that changed drastically and has been that way ever since. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, at least in terms of describing it, but I know I'm not a big fan of it. However, I will say that pretty much the rest of the planet aside from myself has quite incessantly sung praises of the band since the release of this album.

'Enemy...' is a pretty good album that sort of serves as a mash-up of the many styles the band had experimented with up until that point. Somewhere along the line things tend to blur into one another and my attention span begins to fade, but again, this is still a fairly rad album to listen to from time to time.

Diatribes

Easily ND's catchiest album to date. Diatribes is so obviously a stab at commercial success, painfully so, even. Nonetheless, Diatribes has two things going for it... one, despite the band's attempt to garner a larger audience, the trademark ND "sound" is still there and had this indeed become a breakthrough album for the band it would have undoubtedly been the heaviest thing ever to have smothered the masses. Secondly, this album showed that ND were quite capable of writing snappier numbers as opposed to endlessly dishing out the more "thought-worthy" compositions of old. In a less plastic world ND just might have attained the sort of success enjoyed by the likes of Pantera and Metallica. Unfortunately, this album was not the grenade aimed at blowing up the Billboard charts and it served only to alienate their fanbase even further. Not a bad album though I would've preferred further exploration into the post-apocalyptic landscape of their previous album, 'Fear, Emptiness, Despair'.

Order of the Leech

Starts off strong and then just sort of loses focus and intent and meanders for the remainder of the duration. As far as I'm concerned this is the very last ND album that carried with it any of the flavor of the past. It is also the last album to showcase Barney's signature "crunch" vocal style before he caught the case of laryngitis that continues to plague his performance to this day.

Utilitarian

Pretty much the same shit as the last four or five albums before it but with a few surprises that make it interesting such as the horns on the second track. Not terribly keen on the guitar sound here and ol' Barney boy just sounds shot. Angry but shot. Props to the band for the groovy throwback album cover.

Smear Campaign

One of the better albums to have come out from post millennium ND. Not sure if that's saying much or not though.

Time Waits for No Slave

Again, this is basically the same album they've been releasing since 2000's 'Enemy of the Music Business'. Not a fan of the weak and generic guitar sound and Barney just sounds drained.

The Code is Red... Long Live the Code

See the above review. (By the way, this is the first album to fully feature Barney boy in "non-crunch" mode)

Words From the Exit Wound

After what I thought was a killer album (Inside the Torn Apart) ND decided to go for a more "experimental" (?) approach which frankly, totally fucked up any of the momentum the band had gained on the last album. The songs here do not challenge the way they ought to for an album of this type and the aggression is neutered and watered down in an odd way that defies description.

Napalm Death - Scum (1987)

I first bought this way back in the late '80's at 'Record Breaker' (R.I.P.) in Meriden, CT. It was the pink cassette version. All I know is that the big "thing" in those days was being the fastest! At some point, D.R.I. were the unbridled kings of speed, then of course Slayer with songs such as 'Necrophobic' (probably their fastest to date) bolstering their cause and raising them to mythological levels. When I heard that there was a band called Napalm Death, I knew immediately that they were going to kick my fucking face off. I mean, Napalm fucking Death??!! How could you go wrong with a name like that? You couldn't... Just on the strength of the band's name alone I went and vamped a copy of their debut and was immediately blown away.

I always preferred side-B (with Lee Dorrian on vocals and Bill Steer on guitar) as the violence was considerably ramped up. Nothing wrong with side-A and actually after all these years I am rather fond of the occasional listen what with all of the memories it awakens, but the Dorrian/Steer version of Napalm is perhaps the most caustic that ever was and will be. A fact cemented by the band's next album, 'From Enslavement to Obliteration'.

Scum is and will always be a very important album in my life as it was a giant leap forward and away from a lot of the "happy" thrash that I admittedly had a good bit of in my tape collection. It pretty much set me on a one way journey to seek out other extreme releases and my tastes were forever altered from then on. Oddly, Scum is an album that I grew out of fairly quick, at least once I began to discover albums that I considered to be more to my liking such as Deicide's debut, Pestilence 'Consuming Impulse', early Obituary and pretty much the entire Earache catalog in those days. Scum quickly became more of a novelty record. Something you put on to blow your friend's minds with by its sheer velocity and rage. When alone and out for a walk, etc. I found myself craving something a bit less chaotic. I'm probably one of the very few people on Earth who prefers the Greenway/Pintado/Harris era starting from Harmony Corruption and (for me) ending with Inside the Torn Apart. After that album everything just sounded like one long continuous tired retread of the band's early-mid '90's releases.

After the band's sophomore album I couldn't see them going on like that. They gave it one last go with the Mentally Murdered -ep- before Steer and Dorrian flew the coop to pursue wildly different musical paths. Carcass maybe not so different (in the beginning at any rate) but ND would permanently change their sound, style and technique for good after that, essentially becoming a completely different (and in my opinion, better) band.

For what it's worth, Scum is a milestone of anything to be considered "extreme" within the metal genre save for perhaps doom. Every time you hear a blast beat, be it in a black metal song, death metal or grindcore, rest assured that that is the result of the influence of this album. If there was no Napalm there would be no Terrorizer or Morbid Angel and without the latter death metal bands worldwide may very well be relying on the good old "skank" to get their speed across, even to this day. So while I may have grown bored with Scum many moons ago, make no mistake... it is and will always be one of the albums that changed my life.

Napalm Death - Harmony Corruption (1990)

Easily my favorite ND album. After 'From Enslavement...' I was relieved that they changed things up a bit. I couldn't imagine yet another album in that style. Sure, it was cool for what it was as was 'Scum', but the novelty was wearing thin and if they were going to stick around for a while they were in dire need of some serious changes.

I for one am not one of the gay "punk" douche-bags that cried all the way home about the changes made within the ND faction. For one, I've always been a metalhead, first and foremost. I never liked punk. Period. The music sucked. The douche-bags that populated that scene sucked, The lame "punk attitude" thing was gay and so on and so fourth. When ND went all out death metal, I thought "fuck yeah!", now this is more like it! Don't get me wrong, I was all about their early grindcore stuff and I'll never forget the day I went to the record store, purchased my "pink" (yep) copy of 'Scum' on cassette, brought it home and was completely bludgeoned by it. It was cool then and on occasion I'll pop it in (more for nostalgic purposes than anything else) for the hell of it, but I just couldn't see Napalm belting out a continuous succession of Scum's and From Enslavement's. One more album done in that fashion would have been overkill. The transition to full blown death metal began with 'Mentally Murdered' and was complete with 'Harmony Corruption'.

I was not expecting the vengeful, hateful blast beat/Barney roar combo that would coming crashing through the gates, unexpectedly amidst the static laden intro. I was momentarily dazed. Once the dust quickly settled I noticed the bizarre tremolo riffing of team Pintado/Harris doing its thing and I knew right away that everything was gonna be alright. To date, this is ND's finest hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there's a million naysayers out there that wanna tell you that ND died after Steer and Dorrian flew the coop, well, fuck 'em. Their opinions don't mean shit to me. There's also a newfound and rabid interest in the band due to their supposed "return to form" starting with 2000's 'Enemy of the Music Business'. Apparently I'm in the minority on this one as I can't shake the feeling that a very large and important ingredient is missing. The band's early 90's mojo is obviously a thing of the past and I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the 900 albums they've released in the last 10 or so years. Again, for me, Harmony is the pinnacle moment of the band with a couple of worthy follow-ups since but nothing quite on its level.

Barney's vocals are unbelievably hateful and monstrous sounding, "New guys" Jesse Pintado and Mitch Harris really added a new dimension to the band yet kept everything sounding just as intense as the band's previous albums. The songs are more tempered. Not in the sense that they've lost their edge, but there is more of a notion of "craftsmanship" this time around and Mick Harris' drumming is on point throughout the duration, mixing it up between blasts and beats and I'm sorry to all the "trigger haters" out there, but Scott Burns did a fucking fantastic job on this album.

Napalm Death - Fear, Emptiness, Despair (1994)

I know all the blast fags of the world had their hineys in an uproar when this came out, but being that I've, for the most part, considered blast beating to be an endeavor enjoyed and obsessed over by the retarded, it didn't bother me much that ND ever so slightly toned the pace this time around. I've always been in search of heavier shit and there was plenty to be found here.

I can only assume that after 4 albums that featured an incessant amount of blast beating, ND decided it was time to explore other avenues of extremity wrought by a slower pace. Fine by me. Fear, Emptiness, Despair features quite a few of what I consider to be ND's best songs including 'Hung', 'State of Emergency' and 'Armageddon X 7'.

The guitar team of Jesse Pintado and Mitch Harris has always been one of my favorites as they were never dry on ideas and always managed to come up with some of the more kookier riffage in death metal. I can say with confidence that FED is the pinnacle of the duo's bizzaro ideas. There's even an ever so slight industrial feel throughout the aural festivities on display which serves to add yet another layer of heaviness atop an already colossal piece of work. The greater portion of this album is on the slower to mid-paced side of the fence with an occasional blast thrown in to accentuate certain riffs and arrangements. Barney sounds particularly bestial on this album as he bellows and shouts in an almost off key approach, a style that he had begun to employ on 'Utopia Banished'.

If I had to say, the weakest link here would be drummer Danny Herrera, who, while certainly not doing a horrible job by any means, just doesn't really do anything terribly interesting. Mick Harris he is not, and I'm also not a big fan of the drum sound on this record. Aside from from that minor gripe, this is probably the last "extreme" album the band released until their much heralded "return to form", although for my money, 'Inside the Torn Apart' could have easily passed as the sequel to this album as the two have much in common. They're both innovative, somewhat progressive and industrial tinged but without sacrificing any of the intensity the band had initially based their career around.

This is definitely more death metal than grind, a fact made obvious by the scarce use of blast beats, though it could be reasonably argued that the ND officially became a death metal band with the release of 1990's 'Harmony Corruption'. I for one embraced the band's crossover as I was beginning to get bored by their earlier approach. Sure, 'Scum' knocked my socks off like everyone else at the time of its release and 'From Enslavement to Obliteration' was basically a tighter version of that album, but after the initial shock began to wear off, I had quickly grew tired of the constant blasting/haggard vocal approach and was pleasantly blown away when I heard what the new line-up had to offer. It would be nice to see ND revisit the style that they had begun to mine on this album, but then again, they'd probably manage to somehow drop the ball as most bands do when they try and recapture their glory days. I have to give mention to Meathook Seed's 'Embedded' album as that was a side project of Napalm guitarist Mick Harris and it is very similar in sound what with the bizarre rhythmic tendencies and industrial flavor.

Napalm Death - Words from the Exit Wound (1998)

Not quite sure what the fuck ND were thinking on this one. They had just begun to recover from the commercial misstep of Diatribes with '97's overlooked gem, Inside the Torn Apart, and then for some reason  said "fuck it" and decided to venture into left field with this release. As bizarre an entity as this release was (and is), it's not even really that much of an oddity in terms of experimentation, although the band had begun to infuse into its aural arsenal such a sterile tone that it makes me wonder if they were all high on rubber cement during the recording of this album.

In a way, this album is sort of the antithesis of Diatribes. While that album was an obvious attempt to commercialize the band's sound with a more compressed accessibility, this album is more "out there" and even, dare I say, "progressive" sounding at times. While this is not a bad thing, ND largely manages to fumble the ball, and this is in no small part due to the sterility of the guitar sound and production overall. Even the riffing sounds uninspired here, which is really saying something considering that even on their more commercial sounding efforts, the ND writing squad has always had a knack for creativity.

Personally, I wasn't bowled over by the band's alleged "return to form" starting with 2000's 'Enemy of the Music Business', mainly because of the oddly sterile guitar sound that the band had carried over with them from this release. Throwing more blasts over that shitty sound and halfhearted riff gymnastics did little to convince me that the band were indeed back on track.

I definitely do not see this album as being some kind of attempt at selling out. For all intents and purposes, the aggression is still there even though this is a far cry from what the band was doing on 'Utopia Banished' and even farther than the Dorrian/Steer era.

This album also marks the last time the band would use that horrendously gay "mid-era" logo that they had begun sporting back in '94.

Napalm Death - Diatribes (1996)

This was the first notable chink in ND's armor. While many folks decried the experimentation and somewhat slower pace of 'Fear, Emptiness, Despair', I felt that that album was a great and logical step in the right direction for the band. Unfortunately, ND took and ran with some of the "softer" elements of that album and the end result was 1996's 'Diatribes'.

This was an easily identifiable attempt at commercializing their sound with the emphasis for accessibility glaringly transparent. Had these songs actually cracked the Billboard charts and made an appearance on national radio, television, etc, I would have been happy for the band, regardless of my preference for the band's older material. Unfortunately, this was far from the case and the album itself is just far too soft and poppy sounding (regardless of Barney's roaring croak) to be consistent with persistent spins on ye ol' turntable. 

If one thing can be said about ND's brazen attempt at "fitting in", it's that the band certainly proved that they had indeed possessed a knack for writing a catchy tune (although, one could argue that 'Harmony Corruption' had no shortage of snappy odes, albeit a bit more abrasive and maniacally paced than the material found here). I would say that, in terms of straightforwardness and accessibility, ND were closer to the mark than Carcass were on their final outing.

Ultimately, this album comes across as a brief hiccup in ND's career until the infinitely superior 'Inside the Torn Apart' came around the following year. Interestingly, ND would again delve into a period of lackluster songwriting and laughable attempts at sounding aggressive with 1998's 'Words From the Exit Wound'. One could surmise that 97's 'ITTA' should have been the album to succeed 'Fear, Emptiness, Despair', while 'Diatribes' and 'WFTEW' are a bit more properly aligned with one another. Whatever the case, while there have undoubtedly been far worse attempts at selling out, 'Diatribes' is an album that I certainly could have done without and seldom have the desire to revisit.