Napalm Death

By Júlio Valada on Feb 7, 2012 in Cd Review | 0 comments

Album: Utilitarian
Label: Century Media
Tracks: 16
Release Date: February 27th
Length: 46’11”

Riff Score: 9.0/10

Napalm Death are back to deliver the fourteenth album of their career. Utilitarian has it all, an old school cover art reminiscent of their late eighties efforts, a pissed off Barney and a crusty musical output.

If there are bands which have nothing more to prove in this time and age then Napalm Death is certainly one of them. The British band played a major role in birthing and developing what is nowadays the most common punk subgenre, grindcore. They actually started as a hardcore punk act in the early eighties but it wouldn’t take them much time to fuse metal influences with their punk derived beatings, taking queues at everything that was part of underground extreme music at the time. The result ended in two albums that remain classics until today, their debut album Scum which still sounded more punk than metal, and the FETO (From Enslavement To Obliteration) album which pretty much defined grindcore singlehandedly. Some might say that Repulsion are the founders of the genre because Horrified was initially recorded back in 1986, but so was the FETO demo tape, and considering the actual release dates of both full-length albums then Napalm Death won the race.

No one can deny the sheer impact of the 1988 recording on a scene that had few to no practitioners at the time, as the following years would see an arise in popularity and quality outputs from other, now legendary, bands like Carcass, Terrorizer, Brutal Truth or Assück. This was the dawn of a new age in extreme music and being alongside the mutual development of contemporary extremist death metal, grindcore saw itself many times connected and fused with its fellow brother in the violent arts. This resulted in many hybrid albums that ended up being dubbed “deathgrind”. And as your favourite influential band of the hour Napalm Death was there too, presenting us with their much vaunted classic Harmony Corruption. Now if you stop for a minute to think that the event I’m describing happened 22 years ago you can hardly fathom the thought of this band still be releasing quality albums nowadays, because how can they keep up the quality output for so long? Well, this is 2012 and Utilitarian definitely wants a word with you!

This album is a clear continuation of the last couple of efforts by the band, with an added sense of atmosphere and small uncharacteristic elements that increase its variety and enrich the compositional process. A parallelism can be traced between the start of Utilitarian and that of Smear Campaign, where the atmospheric intro “Weltschmerz” followed by the rabid and violent “Sink Fast, Let Go” equal “Circumspect” and “Errors In The Signals” in this 2012 album. Few adjectives can define the amount of aggression that is suddenly poured out of the speakers into my hearing canals as this song develops into another anthem of a chorus. No time to breathe as the first signs of embracing unorthodox elements arrive in the form of John Zorn’s schizophrenic saxophone leads in “Everyday Pox”. It’s just so creepy but yet so fitting in this concept of political extreme music, while the main guitar riff already brings back memories of Harmony Corruption. The pure display of punkish aggression continues to enfold in a maddening fashion as Barney seems to have swallowed some super speeds that make him bounce of the studio walls as much as he does during live shows. And yet by the time that “The Wolf I Feed” gets to be the main attraction we find what is probably the best and catchiest chorus of the album, along with the one of “Analysis Paralysis” which is also infectiously good, and sung clean in that nasal tone typical of Burton C. Bell. I’m not sure if it’s Burton or not but it sure sounds like him and it makes me think back to Fear Factory’s debut, which coincidently was very influenced by the early nineties incarnation of Napalm Death.

That only accounted for a third of the album and as it continues to roll on more heads fall in its destructive path, unrelenting and brutish in its delivery, up close and personal in its attack, furious and pissed off beyond recognition in the constant barking at the targets at hand. This is pure aggression, and yet so many of those great grooves that the band has accustomed us are still present and concealed within all the madness. Songs like “Collision Course”, “Orders Of Magnitude” or “Blank Look About Face” show the more mid-tempo part of the band’s death metal side, while speeding razor bullets are discharged on the punkish “Think Tank Trials”, “Leper Colony”, “Nom De Guerre” and “Opposites Repellent”. Those little quirks that the band has managed to envelop in the midst of their song structure continue to bear a presence throughout the album, and we get to see some clean singing sections as much as some atmospheric leanings that resemble somewhat of an industrialized feeling.

Utilitarian is a punishing piece of extreme music that goes on for 45 minutes, hunting down fat politicians and money-hungry bankers that show no respect for the average human. The band has released many good albums throughout its career but this new effort marks itself as definitely one of the strongest. It seems that they’ve found a perfect balance where they can be a death metal band as much as a punk-oriented grindcore act. This balance has eluded the band during a part of its career and now it seems like age, along with a two decade long stable line-up, has perfected and roughened the crust leaden edges of this legendary act. I began this review by saying that Napalm Death has nothing more to prove, but if this new record is indicative of anything then it would be that they still demand a lot from themselves and intend to continually reinvent their songwriting into new quality albums. Older bands seem to have been spiked by the new retro bands and are now retaliating in force and doing what they do best. Utilitarian is another great example of their sustainability and ability to endure the passage of time.

By: Júlio Valada