Napalm Death - Fear, Emptiness, Despair
I highly recommend the recent film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. It’s a monster movie, but its real monsters are humans. The film explores human psychology – specifically, the response in a confined space to an unknown threat. Interestingly, director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) made the ending darker than King’s original – not the usual Hollywood trajectory. The ending is a Twilight Zone-type shocker, causing Thomas Jane’s protagonist to emit an intense primal scream. It immediately reminded me of Barney Greenway’s guttural growl at the beginning of “Twist the Knife (Slowly),” which leads off Napalm Death’s Fear, Emptiness, Despair (Earache/Columbia, 1994).
Fear, Emptiness, Despair is by far my favorite Napalm Death record. Ironically, it’s probably the one most unlike their legacy as grindcore pioneers, as it’s mostly straight-up death metal. Some have called it “experimental,” but that term better suits the follow-up Diatribes, which flirts with clean tones and hip hop. Sure, this was the band’s major label record – but they put that money to good use. The sound is cold, clinical, and the biggest Napalm Death ever had.
The recording process was fraught with tension, and it shows. FED churns with roiling, mid-paced riffs alternating with upper-register tremolo picking (a Napalm Death signature from this point on). Danny Herrera’s drumming is bulletproof; while Mick Harris deservedly gets props as inventor of the blastbeat, Herrera kicked the band up a notch. Industrial harmonics in “Armageddon x 7”; sheets of jangly dissonance in “Fasting on Deception”; wild machine gun melodies in “Primed Time” – all cruel and thrilling. “Hung” begins like an outtake from Sepultura’s Chaos A.D., then shifts into a neck-snapping hail of blastbeats and thrash beats. Absolutely essential.
