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Enemy of the Music Business (2000)
Released in 25 September 2000

What can be said about this? And how unoriginal it is to start a commentaryon the record this way? Napalm Death are back and they won't kid aroundabout it. After troubled times with Earache and a change of managing thepioneers of grind come back, blasting away. The tonic of the album is thebasically formula which ND has developed over the years, blast beats mixedwith heavy, crusty and catching riffing, and this time they decided to makeit as fast and aggressive as possible, without losing the edge the bandhas developed over the years.
The sound is indeed a comeback to grind on it's full. The identity of theband is preserved as Napalm Death realised that extreme and creative grindcoreis what this act is all about. It opens very violently with "Tastethe Poison" (maybe a Straight Edge Diatribe by Mark Greenway?) a songin which we are greeted by a cutting riff which works, as so many of Napalm'sgreat riffs, in a ciclic way, repeating itself anouncing the speed whichwill come. The race starts and Herrera's drumming runs wild and hardcore,"This is Napalm Death" is the message. "Next on the List"follows, very heavy in the early notes, gradually becoming the trademarkNapalm Death sound and exploding with wild fury. What we have here is maturegrindcore. Whereas in the old days the dissonance would be punk and disorganizedin a teenage way, Napalm Death has learned to control it's anger into sonicbits of blast and heavy riffing, the songs are built in a way which blastingand cascading waves of drumming topped with brutal guitar riffs are completelyorganized to reach calculated agressivity. The evolution of the genre theband has created results in something they have learned to control. Basically,it's like a nuclear bomb dropped into a hermetically sealed room: let'swatch it burn. This maturity is reflected in the lyrics. In "Can'tPlay, Won't Pay". Greenway screams: "Ten years of all all sidessniping, fairness under fire (..) still didnt finish us" certainlya reflection of the current status the band has achieved and the troubledtimes they have been through sticking with the underground. Refusing tobe a part of conventional rock and mainstream system has costed Napalm Deatha lot. How hard it is to keep your integrity in the dark days of neo-liberalismand a policy of imperalism disguised as "globalisation" that welive in? "(We're) Enemies of the music business, you corporate fuck"again sings Greenway, and it doens't get any more blunt (and sincere) thanthis. Ten years of refusing to be a part of the herd has costed a lot toNapalm Death, but they just won't fucking give up will they? "Nameyour price for progress (...) Stylize, making it easy on the eye" says"The Public gets what the public doesn't want", an obvious criticto mass culture products and hysteria in which we live in (Britney Spears,Green Day or Five anyone? Yes it is a cliche complaining about this sortof commercial pop culture byproduct, but the point is: what is NOT a clichenowadays?) shows that despite living underground for so long the band isyet to cave in and give up showing how ugly their music can be, by pointingout the hipocrisy of this world. The songs run faster with no melody, noprisioners taken. Better yet than reading about it you should be listeningto the damn thing. Just buy it, Napalm Death has been through this for twentylong years and they still are enemies of the music business as much as theywere in their first day in 1981. Their rage won't go down, after two decadesof abuse this band writes songs like "Blunt Against the Cutting Edge".This is called integrity. From punk rock to the mature, groundbreaking soundsof grindcore that we have today it has been a long and wild trip. Learnwith the masters, there are none better. WWW.ENEMYOFTHEMUSICBUSINESS.COM

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