November 7, 2012

Napalm Death - Scum - From Enslavement to Obliteration

Napalm Death's Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration. The birth of grindcore from 1987 and 1988. In the expanded and remastered 25 years anniversary versions. On the newly opened Earache Records Bandcamp. Oh yes! The press release for Scum states that
The album has been specially remastered from the original tapes using Full Dynamic Range (FDR), allowing the music’s nuances to shine through, giving the whole album a more ferocious and dynamic sound
This review from Freq tells what this actually means for you, the listener:
This re-issue has plenty of moments where you can hear THE FUCK out of the drummer, the vocal reverbs, the guitar crunch and so on. Weirdly, this feels like a moment when Grindcore has, by some cultural osmosis, been absorbed into a world where it’s really nice to hear every element of the playing on a record which, when I first heard it, was a baffling wall of noise.
In the end of this interview from Decibel Magazine, Mick Harris (the drummer on both albums) discusses Scum in context of the re-release. He describes it as essentially two different recordings with two different lineups and two different sounds:
the muddiness of side B and then the heaviness of side A—Justin [Broadrick] caught a bit of [Celtic] Frost on there, we won’t deny that! Quality influence but Justin’s take on it, that bend of the string and those little harmonics that he’d put at the start of it
Later he names side A the thrashier fare and calls side B just filth. This puts in words why side A was always my favorite, it does have a more metallic edge. And I can assure you, the menacing riffs of the title track and the fantastic blasting section in the middle of Siege of Power has never sounded better!

From Enslavement to Obliteration is an album I somehow never got around to - a mistake I intend to rectify right away. Off course The Metal Archives has lots of reviews of both these seminal albums, go here for Scum and here for FETO.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]

  1. I'm gonna save up my money and buy physical copies of both those albums!

    1. I just bought FLAC copies of both of these. 87 tracks of grindy goodness.