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Napalm Death Diatribes Earache Grindcore frightens some people, but not me. I am quite comfortable with the genre's garish fascination with the Armageddon. Groups like Napalm Death are only foreshadowing the torturously slow decline of John Wayne's West world. The band's most recent release is one of its hardest musical statements yet even while attempting to soften the blows against the empire with quasimelodic tunesmithing. No doubt the group's necromancing hardcore fans will howl about a "sell-out" because of Napalm Death's attempts to bring the noise with a discernible beat for a change. But that bunch of triple-K swine knows not of what it speaks. The entombed vocals on "Glimpse Into Genocide," "Greed Killing" and, especially, "Cursed to Crawl" are still reasonably accurate portraits of a sunless, failing culture on its last legs. The band's instrumental acumen is cruelly sharp, and the album is riddled with an intense self-disgust. Only fools and their friends would mistake it for crypto-melodic clatter whose sole aim is to garner big profits. No. These representatives of maggot-brained former cave-dwellers mean every syllable they sing, every warped note they play. Napalm Death's Diatribe is just what the coroner ordered. (Nicky Baxter) [ Metro | Metroactive Central | Archives ]