Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat (Century Media, 2015)

How good is the new Napalm Death death album?  Against all odds, this band continues to age like a fine wine, and Apex Predator – Easy Meat continues the unfuckwithable fifteen-years-and-counting roll they’ve been on since 2000’s Enemy of the Music Business.  I pretty much said everything I have to say about the band’s late-career renaissance in my review of 2012’s Utilitarian, but it’d be downright shameful if I neglected to spill at least a little bit of digital ink on the stunning piece of work they’ve unleashed in 2015.

Although Napalm Death largely sticks to the hybrid formula they’ve been settling into over the past decade-and-a-half, they also continue to experiment; witness the percussion and chanting dominated title track, or the strange, electronically-treated vocals that pop up on “Smash a Single Digit,” and that’s just within the album’s first two songs. For the most part though, the band continues to be as ferocious as they’ve ever been, all blunt force trauma blast beats and razor-sharp guitars.  “How the Years Condemn” sports a groove that wouldn’t have been out of place on 1996’s Diatribes, while “Beyond the Pale” harks back to the band’s roots in hardcore punk; it is this ability to simultaneously push forward and honor the past that makes Napalm Death so compelling even after over a milestone thirty years in the game.

In addition to being among the most vicious, Apex Predator-Easy Meat is also one of Napalm Death’s best-sounding latter-day albums; just as the quartet continues to sharpen and refine its approach, so too does long-time producer Russ Russell continue to mold them into one of the heaviest bands on the planet.  The album is almost impossibly dense, yet none of the dynamics are lost whether the band is grinding your skull to a fine powder on a track like “Bloodless Coup” or slugging their way through a slower number such as “Dear Slum Landlord.”  It’s like being bashed in the face with a sack of cinder blocks over and over again in the most enjoyable way possible.

At this point it’s pretty much a given that whatever Napalm Death puts out is going to be worth hearing.  That might make reviewing their records seem a tad futile, but I for one think the level of excellence this veteran band continues to exhibit deserves to be celebrated.

http://www.napalmdeath.org/