Fourteenth out of fifteen. That is where Shane Embury put Words from the Exit Wound when he ranked every Napalm Death album for Decibel, in a piece published on 13 December 2017, and the man is credited with the music on a good share of it. Bass players are rarely this rough on their own furniture.
Recorded in June 1998 at Chapel Studios in South Thoresby, Lincolnshire, with Colin Richardson producing them for the last time and the same five men who had made Inside the Torn Apart a year earlier, the eighth album is the sound of a band in the final month of a lease, notice taped to the fridge, half the rooms in boxes, nobody sure whose mug is whose. Earache was the landlord. The moving date sits in that same Decibel piece, in Embury's own words: "This was the last album we did for Earache Records and it was also time for parting ways with our management company."
So the tenants packed. Some of them packed angrily.
The angriest box goes out first. The grind veterans with their deposit already written off open on "The Infiltraitor", four and a half minutes that rip the skirting boards off every wall in the place: blasts, a chorus with a fist inside it, a breakdown heavy enough to crack the floorboards, and Barney Greenway roaring as if the bailiffs were already on the stairs. It is the best song here by a distance. Its music came from the bassist who ranked the album fourteenth, which tells you grind keeps its sense of humour even when its members misplace theirs.
Where did the fury come from, after two records spent rearranging the furniture with the lights off? Embury again, same piece: "Barney and I were loving the band Nasum at the time. Seemed right to kick up a gear, and this album certainly ignited that resurgence a little." A little is the honest word. The Swedish shrapnel lands hardest in two other rooms. "Ulterior Exterior" is one minute fifty of blunt trauma, the shortest thing on the record and the closest it comes to a grind band remembering its own name. "Cleanse Impure" brings the blasts back like an old flatmate who kept a key and lets himself in at three in the morning.
The slow rooms are not all junk, either. "Next of Kin to Chaos", a Mitch Harris song, drags its feet on purpose: a chugging, atmospheric piece with the guitars hanging smoke over a pounding beat, the clearest proof that the experimental years taught this band something besides how to empty a venue. In the same 2017 piece Embury names it, alongside "Cleanse Impure" and "Repression Out of Uniform", among the songs he wanted back in the live set. I have no quarrel with a grind band slowing down when the slow song is this good.
Then Harris does it again from the other end. Built around the best riff on the album, a death-grind charge that tears straight through the plasterboard and keeps tearing, "Thrown Down a Rope" is where the old band and the new one finally share a sofa without arguing about the remote, and it is the second reason to own this disc.
The trouble lives in the hallway between those rooms. Too much of the middle stretch is mid-paced groove with no hook to hang a coat on, padded out with samples and industrial noise that make the house look lived in while nobody is actually living there. And Greenway tries clean singing. Every clean line lands like a television slipping out of the removal men's hands. Nobody is hurt. Everybody winces.
The sound itself is the one thing nobody would send back. Richardson made them huge and clear, every guitar audible, the bass thick enough to stand a spoon in. It came at a price, and Embury, again in Decibel on 13 December 2017, named it: "This was the last album we used Colin Richardson, a great producer but ultimately someone who took too long getting sounds for us. I think on this album it killed the vibe a little. I know it killed Danny's vibe." A polished floor in a flat everybody is leaving. Lovely to look at, and nobody dances on it.
Every clean line lands like a television slipping out of the removal men's hands.
Moving day is not the new house, and this record never pretends otherwise. This is the van with the doors still open, three good pieces strapped to the side and a lot of flat-pack nobody will build again. Take "The Infiltraitor", "Thrown Down a Rope" and "Next of Kin to Chaos", twelve minutes that hold up against most of what Napalm Death recorded in the second half of the nineties, and leave everything else with the keys on the kitchen table.