Monday, April 20, 2009

Dusting Off a Cassette Pt. 8: Napalm Death: Fear, Emptiness, Despair


I'm not overly familiar with grindcore. I know that it got an initial push in England in the mid 1980's when Napalm Death, Carcass, and Bolt Thrower all developed. It is a form of extreme hardcore music and is not based in metal. However, many grindcore bands started to incorporate death metal influences. Each of the pioneers listed above added death metal riffs to their sound and gradually each one became more of a death metal band than a grindcore band. Only Napalm Death went back a little bit and became death/grind.

Napalm Death itself is an odd band since none of the original members are still with the band. Original singer Lee Dorrian decided he didn't want to play hardcore so he left and formed the doom metal band Cathedral. The current singer Barney Greenway used to be in UK death metal band Benediction. Original guitarist Justin Broadrick left to form Godflesh and then Jesu. The other original members all formed other hardcore acts or in one sad case, died.

Anyway onto the album. Since I don't know much about grindcore, I cannot speculate whether this is a good example or not. To me it sounds more death metal influenced than grindcore, and I am okay with that. I like this album although it is not well-respected among Napalm Death fans. The album opens strongly with "Twist the Knife (Slowly)" and we are off to the races from there. The band never lets up in the entire album. It is grinding riff after grinding riff after grinding riff.

This is the only Napalm Death album I own, and I might be willing to check out some other stuff based on it.

1 comment:

  1. If you haven't already delved further into them, I'd personally suggest starting with their newest stuff first, as it's more of a death/grind rather than their early material which is pure grindcore with all those 20 second songs and such. They seem to have matured musically quite bit over the years. At least that's my opinion.

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