In retrospect it seems that Napalm Death's debut record, Scum, existed with the sole purpose of kicking off the grind phenomenon, a musical endeavor now in its third decade. It's a thoroughly ugly album, and it should be fairly apparent that the band (then very young and with a substantially different line-up) sought to create the meanest, filthiest sounding slab of punk angst ever recorded. While the music doesn't exactly bring the capitalist establishment to its knees, the anger seems quite genuine. All the grind clichés are set into place on Scum: the blast beat mayhem, the cackling distorted bass, the unintelligible vocals, and those kick-ass punk grooves. The young Lee Dorian and then-bassist Nik Bullen provide the aforementioned unintelligible vocals (literally sounding like "rah-rah-rah!"). The seemingly anonymous lyricists (Mick Harris?) offers a wonderful collection of un-ironic leftist hostility in fine political punk fashion; the second album, From Enslavement to Obliteration contains perhaps some of the best "critical thinking" lyrics ever penned - the lyrics here aren't quite as refined or thoughtful, and are obscured by the utterly insane vocal braying, but man, are they fun! Songs are short in the finest crust tradition (anywhere from five seconds to a minute and a half), comprised solely of blast beats and grooves, and frequently just blast beats. This album probably sounded pretty "out there" to a Reaganite world unaccustomed to grindcore mayhem; only in the U.K. could something like this be played on national radio. I'm very nostalgic about this record - it's the perfect room smashing disc for un-ironic leftists everywhere. Who can't rock out to such classic hits as "Instinct of Survival" or the title track, "Scum"?

Review by James Slone

Review date: 03/2001

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