During the two-year interim separating
Harmony Corruption
from
Napalm Death
's previous album, the band totally revamped its lineup and its sound as well, moving toward the more expansive horizons of standard
death metal
. This move inspired quite a bit of debate among fans.
had been -- and will always be -- the definitive
grindcore
band, as exemplified by
Scum
(1987) and
From Enslavement to Obliteration
(1988), the two albums that practically alone defined an entire new style of extreme
metal
. However, the
of those two albums is not the
of
, not in membership nor sound. The band's vocalist,
Lee Dorian
, split (to join
Cathedral
), as did guitarist
Bill Steer
(
Carcass
), leaving only the band's rhythm section: bassist
Shane Embury
and drummer
Mick Harris
.
Barney Greenway
(formerly of
Benediction
) takes over for
Dorian
, while both
Jesse Pintado
Terrorizer
) and
Mitch Harris
Righteous Pigs
) take over for
Steer
. The addition of
Pintado
and
Harris
particularly opened up a new realm of possibilities for
, and the band indeed stretches out musically. Whereas the sound of
Enslavement
had been characterized by one- or two-minute
blasts, the sound of
is more expansive. The songs range from two minutes to over five, and
often interweave their guitar playing into a dense, dizzying wall of sound that never quite relents until the album reaches its final conclusion. The guitar playing is varied and intricate here; you can hear the distinction between
as they bob and weave around one another. This is much different from
's playing, which had been essentially a frenzied, distorted blur. Furthermore, the band performs full-fledged songs here, not start-stop eruptions of
noise
. A song like
"Suffer the Children"
would have been incredibly out of place on
. In fact, most of the songs here would have been out of place there -- these are straightforward
songs, not
blasts.
Scott Burns
makes this all the more apparent with his crystal-clear production. The resounding question, though, is whether or not all this is good or bad.
play like a tight, muscular
band on
(best highlighted by the aforementioned
), which puts them within the norm for the first time and puts them much at odds with their former selves. Whether or not you favor a
style to a
one is a question worth asking, but the underlying fact of the matter is that
are a new band here, one that plays powerful, albeit relatively straightforward,
. But only for this album. Their next album,
Utopia Banished
(1992), would spiral them off into a more
experimental
hybrid of
, which is where they'd remain for years afterward -- out there, somewhere in between. All considered,
is a bit of a novel album for the band, though one that's not especially remarkable in the big picture. ~ Jason Birchmeier