Napalm Death –
Rare Tracks 86-88 7”
(white label)

Just like the cover says: a bootleg of unreleased studio takes, split EP tracks and live cuts recorded by the “Scum side one” and “From Enslavement..” line-ups of Napalm Death. 15 tracks on a 45rpm 7”.

If you know the score, you won’t gain much from reading further. What more needs to be said? I guess I’m aiming this one at the uninitiated. I don’t mean that in a snobbish sorta fashion, but let’s face it, I don’t write about extreme metal much round here, and chances are there is a significant portion of what I laughably call my readership for whom the idea of listening to Napalm Death would seem an outlandish, nay abhorrent, suggestion. This one goes out to them.

Ahem.

As my tastes have drifted back toward heavier punk/metal recently, I’ve been playing early Napalm Death a lot, and it never ceases to leave me cowering, electrified and awed, if you’re able to triangulate some combination of those varied reactions. Napalm Death is not of my era, not of my culture, and alien to my social circumstances. Nobody (except possibly John Peel) has ever told me I should listen to Napalm Death, and yet I do.

Well I remember, many years ago, when a friend of mine bought “From Enslavement To Obliteration” as part of some ‘three LPs for £5’ deal. We took it home and put it on. We thought it might be funny, if you can believe that. Needless to say, “From Enslavement To Obliteration” is about as funny as cancer, and at least half as harrowing. Birthed in a whole other universe from the camp bombast of ‘Maiden or Venom’s gonzo Satanism, or indeed from the Anal Cunt/Agoraphobic Nosebleed school of goofball grindcore that infested our schoolboy brains through the ‘90s, the suffocating, cathartic violence of the early ND records has existed to wipe the grin from the faces of “lol, metal” chancers like me, every day since they were recorded.

Even more unsettling was a quick glance at the lyrics sheet, revealing a complete absence of the kind of gore and corpse-fucking I had assumed bands like Napalm Death were supposed to bellow about, their unintelligible outpourings instead forming an expressionistic response to the agonising frustrations of global injustice, with a directness and fury that put most of our socially conscious ‘punk’ heroes to shame.

It was all a bit too much to deal with back then. I didn’t really have much of a feeling for truly malevolent music, how ever much I might have fronted. 2010, and the time seems right, don’t ask me why.

I know this isn’t exactly an original observation, but the more I listen, the clearer it becomes that Napalm Death were less a metal band, more an incredibly intense punk band. I mean, they draw on some metal background for sure, but only the bits that really matter – the lingering post-industrial nihilism of Black Sabbath, the screaming adrenalin overload of Slayer. And who, seeking to fuck people up with extreme rock music in the mid-80s, would not draw upon these things? This is the music of men smart and angry enough to know you’re not going to get very bloody far taking your cues from, I dunno, the Exploited or some shit, and that it doesn’t matter what your hair looks like or what kind of trousers you wear either. In spirit and overall emotional heft, they are closer to Black Flag than anything else – music that foregrounds full spectrum HEAVINESS (in the hippie sense of a ‘heavy cat’) over any genre bullshit. Only difference is, ND had a bigger war in mind, with a lot more casualties. They had a copy of “Reign In Blood” too. More of a lightning rocket attack than ‘Flag’s noble trudge through the trenches. Just keep that in mind, ready your neck muscles and drop the needle.

The very nature of this music and its culture – the extremely short songs, constantly fragmenting line-ups, labyrinthine discography – makes it an effort for anyone without nerd-level scene commitment to get a handle on precisely what the hell’s going on over the course of this 7”. As such, I’ll avoid tripping myself up by trying to identify the specific musicians on different bits, and instead just say that there’s nothing on this disc that suggests the music is anything but the work of a single, unified force, drilled to the point of desperate perfection. The dedication it must take for a band to essentially swap their whole line-up halfway through an LP (as ND did on “Scum”) and yet maintain such a unique and demanding sound is mind-boggling. Where did they find TWO guys who could play bass like that? Two guys who could si - uh, make noises with their throat – like that?

I’ve listened to plenty of doom, but I’ve never heard bass that swings so deep, so cthonic as the sound the guy is getting on the studio cuts on this record – ultimate bass cliché I know, but it’s like being hit in the gut by a chunk of flying masonry. Standing in the room where that sound was happening must have really fucking hurt, a point that’s not lost on the vocalist (Lee Dorrian I assume? Did they have another guy before him?) – twenty five years of absurd metal ‘vo-kills’ later, and still no one sounds like that – it’s like someone’s tearing his fucking soul out. I don’t need to tell you about the drumming – you can guess. Guitar sucks the whole sound into itself like a vortex – indescribable fucking distorto-wall/harmelodic whammy nightmare shit, like you might compare to Ron Asheton or Kerry King were the tone not so cruelly, chaotically vile.

Some song titles: “Your Achievement”, “Deceiver”, “Multinational Corporations, pt. 2”, “Retreat To Nowhere”, “Understanding”.

In short, this disc is a sightseeing tour of a couple of years in which one (or, weirdly, perhaps several) of the most deadly serious, unstoppable, flat-out terrifying rock bands ever to exist were performing under the name “Napalm Death”.

Unless you’re a fan of generic, midfield Death Metal (which is fine), the Napalm Death brand has been creatively redundant since probably about the dawn of the ‘90s. Such is the way with ‘heritage’ punk/metal bands. Somewhere in the record racks though, these guys are still there, ready to play songs for you:


No hurry or anything, but one day you might feel like letting them in.

Labels: METAL, Napalm Death, singles reviews