Scum: 20th Anniversary Edition

Recently, I mentioned re-reading an author's early work to a friend. He asked how it was going, and without thinking it over too much, I said although the writer's early sentences could get dense, it felt great returning to a difficult work once it's become almost second-nature familiar. The same could be said for this 20th Anniversary Edition of Napalm Death's Scum.

I just stopped short of writing "Napalm Death's groundbreaking Scum." The English band is rightfully credited with helping to invent grindcore, or at least mixing ingredients that bubbled to the surface and terming a sound that was happening to different degrees elsewhere as well, but Scum's always felt most important to me for establishing a template later extreme metal bands could have fun smashing and expanding. So we could argue about whether this is "seminal" or not but dropping record-geek tropes glosses over the fact that these 28 raw, compelling, sometimes just okay songs are actually scruffy, crusty tunes.

This reissue finds the thrashing, guttural Birmingham trio (and then quartet and then...) new again, context properly reaffixed. It was always there, sure, but as someone too young to get into Scum entirely in 1987 (physically or mentally), it's a treat to have a reason to stop taking it for granted and to really absorb it with its details in mind, instead of plopping it on during a standard death'n'grind listening session. The Napalm Death that exists now, and continues trucking (the 12th Napalm album Smear Campaign was released last year), isn't this band. Not at all. No original members remain. In fact, the folks who got together in 1981 under the Naplam banner were already gone by the second dozen tracks on Scum-- only drummer Mick Harris, who joined in 1985, plays on both sides. (It's a shame. I've always wished Justin Broadrick could somehow pair his scissoring/slashing guitars with Lee Dorrian's evil vocals. Was never a huge fan of Nicholas Bullen's deeper-but-not-deep enough growl.)

It's simple, super-fast music. No tracks live past two minutes. Most handle about three chords or knifing guitar wounds (though the seams feel like they're constantly ready to tear or split under the weight of those blast beats). When you hear the anomolous atmospheric lift-off and guttural chants of "Multinational Corporations" you already know what's coming next, but diving in's still exhilarating.

The first dozen was put to tape in August 1986. The highlights remain Broadrick's slippery solos on "Seige of Power" and "Polluted Minds", the precipitous "Caught...in a Dream", the slower/groovier "Human Garbage", that skittering spacy patch in "Sacrifice," and, of course, the second-and-change-long (1.316, to be exact) "You Suffer". But who am I kidding-- they're best experienced as a giant, fuzzed, angry whirl.

To me the most exciting moment is still the way the sounds and gradations shift so thoroughly with "Life?". That's track 13, intrepid listener, the first of a dozen songs recorded in July 1987 by the different, four-man crew who put together the rest of the album. People quit Napalm Death often. Seriously, though, that tinny, helter skelter transition feels like a monumental sign of the band's ever-shifting future. This is where it gets really nasty. The highlight of these "later songs" is the overall claustrophobia and the withered, weathered voice of Lee Dorrian (who went on to form Cathedral). Check out the hellfire of "Divine Death", "Pseudo Youth", or the blistering "M.A.D."

Of course, the reissue comes with extras and hooks. Why get the new? Well, there's a 45-minute behind-the-music DVD, The Scum Story. On it, Mick Harris walks down memory lane (visiting olden-day practice spaces, Rich Bitch Studios, where the album was recorded, etc) and there are interviews with Earache founder Digby Pearson, Mark Titchner, Kerrang! writer Dom Lawson, and more.

In the end, DVD and history and all that shit aside, what's strangest about close listening to something you thought you knew by heart is how unfamiliar and un-extreme Scum sounds in light of the music it helped birth. Sure, it's kind of obvious, and that's just how it goes with these sorts of things, but kids who've never heard Napalm Death's salad days, and who've cut their teeth on Cephalic Carnage, Nile, Behemoth, or even Dillinger Escape Plan might find it, gulp, sorta tame. Dillinger Escape Plan? Right, time's a motherfucker.