Song of the Night (#17) Napalm Death - Instinct of Survival

I'm capable of tolerating some fairly extreme music. I regularly listen to bands such as Morbid Angel, Bathory, and Cryptopsy, and I've been blasting my eardrums full of heavy metal for so long that little impresses me.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure what to make of Napalm Death.

Press that play button, and you'll be assaulted with pure brutality: vicious blast-beat drumming, explosive riffing and ferociously nonsensical howling.

Napalm Death are revered as the fathers of the Grindcore movement, and the fact that their sound bamboozles and confounds me (and many, many others) is a testament to their creativity and influence. Heavy Metal is a musical genre that prides itself upon being loud, obscene and mean. Napalm Death simply took these values to their most extreme expression and in doing so, challenged every subsequent metal band to do the same.

I picked "Instinct of Survival", but I could have picked damn well any other song off of Scum to showcase the band's power (the infamous and hilarious "You Suffer" was almost too good to resist). I'm not going to comment on any social commentary present in the lyrics, because... well, I really can't understand the lyrics.

The skeptical might repeat the trite statement that this is more noise than music: but to do so is to misunderstand and start very long debates. Napalm Death are intense, but each song definitely has structure and intent (to shatter the eardrums of its puny listeners, possibly). And to make the assumption that songs like Instinct... can't be music is nothing less than arrogant and close-minded.