ALBUM REVIEW: Coded Smears And More Uncommon Slurs – Napalm Death

There are few things in life that bring more pleasure than new NAPALM DEATH music. The once crust punk stalwarts, turned grindcore progenitors, turned modern metal crown-jewels have been experiencing something of a second life over the past decade or so. Following the run of seminal extreme records that redefined the very essence of heaviness in the late 80s and early 90s, much of their post 2000 output lives in the same realm of quality (particularly Enemy Of The Music Business onwards). This newest addition to their phenomenal back-catalogue, Coded Smears And More Uncommon Slurs, is essentially a compilation of rarities, unreleased or obscurely released tracks from as far back as 2004. As such, it seems unfair that it should be put alongside the hot-streak of records the band are currently on. It would also be unfair for a compilation of, dare we say B-sides, that runs for a touch over an hour and a half to in any way blemish the incredible records that precede it.

The whole thing begins to a roaring start (quite literally) with Standardization and Oh So Psuedo, both featuring the band’s modern, riff-oriented approach. One thing that sticks out, quite glaringly across the tracklist is the difference in production jobs between the songs. This is clearest when the leap is made from 2011’s It Failed To Explode to 2004’s Losers. Although somewhat jarring, when was NAPALM DEATH ever meant to be easy listening? Despite the pallet of different styles that post-2000 NAPALM DEATH has in comparison to its crushing, vomit-inducing, grind roots, any recorded output by these four musicians is going to have an air of same-ness. As such, it may seem appropriate to split the 90 minute listening experience into two. On the first half (tracks 1 through 15), there’s five or six standout cuts, certainly including the opening run of three songs and second single, Call That An Option, the unrelenting, stubborn brutality of which possibly makes it the best song on here. We Hunt In Packs and Aim Without An Aim also soar to the very top of the pile and what unites all these tracks is the band’s ability to hit a really strong groove. It’s the key thing that sets some of their modern material as superior to that of their insanely chaotic beginnings. It shows a much more developed, matured attitude to songwriting, compared to the total obliteration of music that they went for before.

And where there are peaks, there are dips. As a collection of 31 songs, there are bound to be some that fall short of others. Losers particularly just seems so tame and leashed when you think about how scathing and indicting this group can be. The chorus of “No one loves a loser” just misses the mark, despite how promisingly charged and propelling the music begins. In this company is the bizarre cover of the CARDIACS‘ To Go Off And Things, lifted from a split with THE MELVINS from 2013. Whatever the keys/synth/glockenspiel sounding instrument is, we’re still unsure if it works, despite the NAPALM DEATH spin.

The second half of the record too holds a good half-dozen brilliantly groove-driven tracks. Earthwire, Will By Mouth, Everything In Mono, Omnipresent Knife In Your Back, Lifeline (SACRILEGE) and Youth Offender all showcase how utterly brilliant and amazingly cathartic pissed-off music can be. The span of Barney Greenway‘s vocal barks across the different eras and styles within the band, present on this compilation is stunning. The production on Will By Mouth and Youth Offender particularly makes it sound like he’s roaring from another room. It’s incredible. The straight-up aggression of the modern breakdown in Everything In Mono too is something else, as is the droning Omnipresent Knife In Your Back, a totally isolated track among the rest of the compilation, oozing that unquantifiable quality that this band boast.

And still on this side there are a handful of songs that sit quite jaggedly in the tracklist. Like the CARDIACS cover, their rendition of GAUZE‘s Crash The Pose is just bizarre. While it’s interesting to hear bands cover the groups that influenced them, when a band such as NAPALM DEATH do a certain thing and a certain sound so well, it’s so strange to hear them do something else, especially when they took the blueprint of that music and made a whole new genre out of it (as they did with hardcore punk). It almost makes these two covers seem somewhat prehistoric, unlike their version of Nazi Punks Fuck Off, which could easily be mistaken as original NAPALM DEATH material. Another aspect of the second half, similarly to the fast half that doesn’t sit quite right is the ending. The last two tracks on this, Atheist Runt and Weltschmerz (Extended Apocalyptic Version), both from the Smear Campaign album sessions in 2006 have this really acute, yet distinct eery industrial tone that lace them. It’s something that rarely appears from the NAPALM camp and even after a month of having this record, it still doesn’t seem obvious whether it totally works or not.

What this really highlights is that, as there’s 31 tracks that runs nearly 100 minutes long, there is a tonne of material on here and with any band at any stage in their career, anything that long is going to have a degree of filler, at least relative to the prevailing quality of the overall compilation. Further to this, with such a vast body of work on display, the order in which the tracks play is somewhat random. Within all this however, is a strong 10 song album that seethes venomous fury and roars unforgiving white-hot hatred. NAPALM DEATH are one of the very best in this game and their recent track record certainly proves this. With Coded Smears and more Uncommon Slurs, it just takes time to find it.

Rating: 7/10

Coded Smears and more Uncommon Slurs is out now on Century Media Records.

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