Showing posts with label utopia banished. Show all posts
Showing posts with label utopia banished. Show all posts

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Fear, Emptiness, Despair: Ranking the Work of Napalm Death Mk. 3

Napalm Death fans generally fall into two categories. There are those perceptive individuals among us who believe their finest moment was Scum, particularly Side A (aka, those who are RIGHT) and untrustworthy mountebanks who argue the band’s best representation was From Enslavement to Obliteration (aka everyone else who is WRONG).  But endlessly debating the relative merits of two albums (especially since we’ve already established the correct answer is Scum Side A) kinda ignores the fact that the band has recorded a dozen other albums since.
The quintet of Mark “Barney” Greenway, Shane Embury, Mitch Harris, Jesse Pintado and Danny Herrera—in various juxtapositions over two decades—took their predecessors’ grind and alloyed it with spine of death metal crunch and crust punk apocalypse, forging a  new middle path that was often delivered in the same indecipherable gibberish language that the cast of The Red Riding Trilogy tried to pass off as English. And whatever you might think about the legitimacy of Napalm Death Mk. 3, that’s an assload of material worth consideration and closer scrutiny. So let’s rank the work of the lineup that has defined Napalm Death for past two decades.