Napalm Death
Utilitarian

By now, every time a new Napalm Death album comes out, I feel something stirring down under and I think back to my first encounter with the Birmingham band.

It was one of those headache-inducing school Mondays after a heavy Sunday when my personal musical pusher returned to me what was the only metal-sharing tool available to me at the time: the 90-minute FX cassette. On side B, there was just one word written, 'Scum', and I remember it made me quite mad. "Who the hell are these Scum? And what is this about not even having the album name and song titles?."

Back then, that half-hour of chaos disgusted me deeply. I wasn't ready. Ok... I liked Maiden, Deep Purple, I was obsessed with everything that went tupa tupa and wha wha, but no one had prepared me for Napalm. It was just too much. Needless to say, 'the Scum' immediately disappeared from the cassette and from my life for years, at least until my hormonal exuberance, the internet, and that insatiable urge for 'even more extreme' led me to discover a whole new genre, grindcore, with all its inherent illogicality. "Scum is THE grind album?! Wait a minute... oh my god!!".

A quarter of a century has passed since the release of that pillar of destruction, and they, after 30 years of career changes that would make Ranieri's Inter jealous, alternative/modernist twists at the end of the millennium, not to mention the tragic loss of the great Jesse Pintado, are still here among us, terrorizing the bourgeois dreams of the most hypocritical part of society.

February 27, 2012: 'Utilitarian' is released. Fifteenth album. I don't think there's much more to add when up there is the Napalm Death brand. A guarantee, someone would say. That's what I think too. Of course, you also read about those who talked about jazz experiments just because in 'Everyday Pox' for 10 seconds emerges the crazy sax of John Zorn or a new evolutionary course for the industrial sprinkles placed here and there among the songs, for the (splendid) slowdowns of 'Fall On Their Swords' and 'Circumspect' or simply for the clean vocals à la Fear Factory of 'The Wolf I Feed'. I wonder if these gentlemen have ever listened to the Albionics in the years of 'Diatribes', 'Greed Killing', or 'Inside The Torn Apart'.

Here is the same, uncompromising desire to smash the butts of recent albums ('The Code is Red...' a manifesto of the 2000s) with a pinch more seasoning and a few less reference points. The now-armored grind, death, and hardcore tooth-grinding mix combined with the indispensable dose of devotion, humility, and social justice in the lyrics overshadow that perceptible veil of self-reference that (inevitably) emerges in the songwriting. It's impossible not to headbang to tracks like 'Protection Racket', 'Quarantined', 'Leper Colony', or the barbaric trio 'Nom de Guerre/Analysis Paralysis/Opposites Repellent', just as it will be impossible for me not to visit them again when they make a stop here in the Boot, maybe in a small social club, surely for no more than 15 euros per head...

Another lesson in style.