Napalm Death - Scum/From Enslavement to Obliteration

Production: Gritty and raw but fitting.

Review: The extreme of protest rock, Napalm Death took the primal thrash ideas of C.O.C. or D.R.I. and threw them into a Discharge-styled highly abstract and virtuous violence, forming grindcore from the remnants of extreme gesture in other genres.

These songs, almost micro-songs, are almost all under two minutes, and most under one, illustrating their genius: although this music hopes to communicate, and does so with surprisingly complexity, it does so directly in thrashing balls of fury that are these two- and three-riff songs. Guitars are almost all power chords in very punk-styled open progressions, but also collide in surges of rhythmic abandon with even interval chord strips that have a savage directness.

Tracklist:

1. Multinational Corporations
2. Instinct Of Survival
3. The Kill
4. Scum
5. Caught... In A Dream
6. Polluted Minds
7. Sacrificed
8. Siege Of Power
9. Control
10. Born On Your Knees Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
11. Human Garbage
12. You Suffer
13. Life? (Brought Into This Emptiness)
14. Prison Without Walls
15. Point Of No Return
16. Negative Approach
17. Success?
18. Deciever
19. C.S. (Conservative Shithead) (Eminent)
20. Parasites
21. Pseudo Youth
22. Divine Death
23. As The Machine Rolls On...
24. Common Enemy
25. Moral Crusade
26. Stigmatized
27. M.A.D.
28. Dragnet
29. Evolved As One
30. It's A M.A.N.S World!
31. Lucid Fairytale
32. Private Death
33. Impressions
34. Unchallenged Hate
35. Uncertainty Blurs The Vision
36. Cock-Rock Alienation
37. Retreat To Nowhere
38. Think For A Minute
39. Display To Me...
40. From Enslavement To Obliteration
41. Blind To The Truth
42. Social Sterility
43. Emotional Suffocation
44. Practice What You Preach
45. Inconceivable?
46. Worlds Apart
47. Obstinate Direction
48. Mentally Murdered
49. Sometimes
50. Make Way!
51. Musclehead
52. Your Achievement
53. Dead
54. Morbid Deceiver

Length: 64:59

Napalm Death - Scum/From Enslavement to Obliteration: Grindcore 1988 Napalm Death

Copyright © 1988 Earache

A good deal of the drumming on this album is timed to be discoordinate with the guitar shredding, and the ranting muffled hoarse ejection of vocals sloughs entirely randomly at opposition to any coherence in that solidified rhythm. Often, as if spent, the band lapses into a growling tide of noise, but the most consistent attribute here is ripping grindcore with furious blast beats driving toward brutal attitudes.

Arguably the best work ever from this band, these two LP's represent a motion in music toward an ultra-minimalist, ugly and seemingly nihilistic style of composition for the sake of removing the blindness of modern social existence, and in their sheer audacity of simplicity and rhythm they succeed.