The Thing That Should Not Be: Carcass

The band: To say you were there when a new musical movement gnawed its way out of the womb like a fetal zombie is a rare accomplishment, but Carcass can claim grindcore, death metal, melodic death and even death ‘n’ roll as progeny. The Liverpuddlians dropped five studio albums over their rather brief career, each an interesting, engaging evolutionary step beyond the previous. But then there was Swansong.

The album: Oh, the album we all love to hate. After Earache and Columbia’s abortive attempt to shove death metal into the mainstream, Swansong became the poster child for perceived efforts to neuter the music and make it more palatable to the MTV set.
Through no fault of his own, Carlo Regadas was no Michael Amott, and nothing he could do would ever win over disaffected fans, especially in the face of Swansong’s awful sounding guitars (though they are heavier than I remember, it’s not the overblown sound I associate with Carcass). Even Ken Owen’s drumming lost all of its verve here, becoming another stale, play-the-beat rock performance. “Corporeal Jigsore Quandray,” this ain’t.
But the largest disappoint, for me, is lyrical. Carcass was the only metal band to really revel in language. They had an almost Dead Kennedys kind of appreciation for witty word play, and Swansong unleashed enough bad puns to fill a respectable episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle. But a decade and a half later, sneering pop culture references to MTV’s lame Rock the Vote, bad Neil Young songs and the marketing phenomenon formerly known as Generation X just come off as incredibly dated and irrelevant.

The verdict: As the recent reunion attests, Swansong was probably not the way Carcass wanted to go out, but with a few years’ perspective, I can see some of the death ‘n’ rollers giving this a second, more charitable listen. But since Heartwork tries my patience these days, I’ll just give Reek of Putrefaction and Symphonies of Sickness another spin.

The Thing That Should Not Be: Terrorizer

The band: Maybe it’s just me, but bands that came, kicked ass and left only one album to mark their passing have a sort of mythic status in my mind, but give Repulsion credit for dining out on one shot of brilliance for 20 years without sullying their rep with poorly conceived new material. Even Mike Amott had the good sense to rename the band Arch Enemy when he decided to reform Carnage post-Carcass. I can think of no better cautionary tale of that than L.A.’s legendary Terrorizer who recorded one posthumous (at the time) album before Jesse Pintado joined the formidable Napalm Death Mark 3 and drummer Pete Sandoval was absorbed into Morbid Angel. World Downfall was a revelation: a death metal/punk hybrid and proof that the limeys hadn’t cornered the market on grind. So why did the band have to go fuck it all up two decades later?

The album: Insert your preferred cliché about assaulting confined aquatic wildlife with high caliber firepower here, but Darker Days Ahead disappointed me. It needed to be said.
His drinking becoming a liability (Mitch Harris has said Pintado couldn’t even get his shit together to play a note on either of his last two albums with Napalm Death), Pintado decided to reform Terrorizer and party like it was 1989. And while not bad for a grind album, Darker Days Ahead was just terrible for a Terrorizer album.
Darker Days Ahead, indeed; weeks after its release, Pintado would be dead.
Was there something wrong with the original “Dead Shall Rise” that necessitated an update damn near 20 years after the fact? Pintado obviously thought so, so in 2006 he rounded up half of Terrorizer and farted out a lame redo that served only to soon part fools (like me) and their money.
Scratch the intro, outro and re-recorded versions of demo and World Downfall tracks and you’re left with a whopping eight songs of midgrade grind. The riffs are passable and I’ve always been a fan of Anthony Rezhawk’s brutal yet intelligible vocal delivery, but what passed for Terrorizer in 2006 was a flat, overproduced shadow of its former self. Sandoval may be one of the greatest drummers to ever sit on a stool, but his playing on Darker Days Ahead is absolutely inexcusable: a clicking typewriter of poorly produced, triggered drumming.
Which is a shame, because with better production (and under any name but Terrorizer), Darker Days Ahead may have been a passable affair. “Fall Out” and “Mayhem” aren’t bad songs; they just can’t live up to World Downfall’s legacy.

The verdict: There’s a reason a Japanese grind band named itself World Downfall and not Darker Days Ahead. Skip this; download this or buy this instead.

The Thing That Should Not Be: Napalm Death

Because I am a complete fucking masochist, I have been repeatedly subjecting myself to some of the worst albums some of the most foundational grind bands ever shat into existence lately, torturing my innocent ears to decide if there are any redeeming qualities to be found.

The band: Oh sure Siege, Repulsion and Cryptic Slaughter were all dabbling in grind’s then-unnamed primordial ooze before Napalm Death came along, but it wasn’t until the Birmingham bangers that anybody put the whole package together and, through some canny marketing, injected the terms grindcore and blast beat into the modern lexicon. But just because you laid a corner stone for a new musical movement doesn’t mean I’ll excuse truly awful singing and lazy, disinterested song writing.

The album: Is Barney in the band? Is Barney out of the band? The title of 1997’s Inside the Torn Apart can be read pretty literally because Napalm Death seemed like it might be on the verge of imploding after frontman Mark Greenway left/was fired from the band and lit out for the greener pastures of Extreme Noise Terror. Once he was coaxed back in the fold, the band unleashed what has to be the worst album in their storied career. Even Colin Richardson’s production was monochromatic and enervated, sapping the effort of any emotion.
I don’t begrudge anybody their experimentation, but Inside the Torn Apart was the unthinkable: a Napalm Death album almost devoid of blast beats or any semblance of their grind glory days. Instead it was a flaccid, murky combination of hardcore and meandering metal that just never seemed to click. Oh sure, it started off strong enough. “Breed to Breathe” is a fairly rocking tune if you dig Diatribes and “Greed Killing,” but things quickly soured over the remaining half an hour or so. Whatever sick bastard brain farted the idea of clean vocals on the title track should be dragged out behind the remains of the Mermaid and beaten senseless by rude boys. This is Napalm Death at an absolute low point, though, incongruously, the song “Lowpoint” is the tune on Torn Apart to feature blast beats and some semblance of grind. “Prelude” is also another rare bright spot, a d-beat (briefly blasted) assault that could have graced Mentally Murdered.
Though I kept buying all of Napalm’s albums (and I admit a certain sentimental affection for later work like Words From the Exit Wound), this was an era when, if we’re honest, we admit probably most of us just stopped caring about Napalm Death. Luckily, a clean break from Earache a few years later a steel toed boot up the ass from a certain Swedish grind collective played Jesus to Napalm’s moribund Lazarus.

The verdict: There are plenty of bands that could have harnessed that internal tension to unleash an ass whupping album, but Napalm Death isn’t one of them. Instead, the band thrives when its internal harmony remains uncorrupted. If you need further proof, drop the needle on any post-Pintado album.