New : Napalm Death - 'Utilitarian'

I was indulging in my typical float around the online music sites this weekend and chanced upon Napalm Death's unfeasibly great new album 'Utilitarian' which came out about a week ago. Their charming bile-spewing vocalist Barney gives the record a track by track guide here and most of the album is up on YouTube too if you fancy having a listen yourself. And as if that weren't thrilling enough, I noticed during the interview that their promotional tour for the album was coming through Paris on Sunday night so I had the pleasure of hearing most of the record live at La Maroquinerie too! I'll admit to having paid relatively little attention to what these guys have been up to over the last few years but a glance at the banker-baiting cover art for 'Utilitarian' made my prick my ears up and check this out. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised - Napalm have lost none of their savage delivery and the current political backdrop in the UK couldn't be better suited to them returning to the fray with another potent dose of extreme metal bloodrush and politically-savvy thematic dissection. If you're unfamiliar with Napalm, let's just say they picked up where political punks like Crass and Discharge left off in the mid 1980s and fused their energy with the emergent extreme metal trends of UK Grindcore and, further down the line, the global Death Metal movement of the late 80s. Fast forward 25 years of playing in toilets, cranking out over a dozen stonking albums and steadfastly refusing to compromise and that gets you to 'Utilitarian'.

In truth I wanted this to be the blisteringly angry record that the whole 'Occupy' movement needed to shock itself into cohesive action - 'Utilitarian' doesn't quite address the matter as directly as you might hope, veering off into a diverse range of anti-establishment topics such as social exclusion, sexuality and the arms trade but the band stick to their guns as they always have and Barney give it both barrels like an angry pitbull trying to shout over a carrier jet during takeoff. They played a fair chunk of it on Sunday too and it sounds fucking great live - I last saw these guys in about 2000 and they're still as relentlessly savage as they were back then, only this time I got right down the front for a proper facefull of it all. Barney' still loveably furious onstage and bassist Shane Embury seems to be straddling the same stage of pattern baldness that he was at 12 years ago which is impressive to say the least. My pint got spilled all over my shirt in the first song and I even ended up losing my wallet getting tossed around in the pit, although one of the stewards very kindly fished it out from the post-gig swamp and gave it back to me, albeit covered in black crap and smelling of lager and footsweat. Still, my cards still seem to work. The fact that nothing got nicked surely acts as proof that these guys are still the vanguard of modern musical socialism. Anyway, 'Utilitarian' is as potent and pertinent today as 'Scum' was back in '87 - get the album and check out the tour if you get the chance, Napalm are still flying the flag for angry fucking punk rock after all these years and this is as a savage as they've ever sounded.