Coded Smears and More Uncommon Slurs

As it turns out, Napalm Death can release 90 minutes of disparate bonus tracks, singles, and tracks from various splits and compilations, complete with production differences and ranging over a recording period of 2004 to 2014, and just about all of them are at least good, if not fantastic additions to your Napalm Death catalog.

18 of these tracks are from studio sessions for the albums "The Code Is Red... Long Live the Code" and forward through "Apex Predator - Easy Meat", and originally appear as bonus tracks on various versions of those respective albums. It's safe to say that just about all of these tracks kick significant amounts of ass and are nearly all of the quality of the respective proper album tracks. The breakdown is as follows: "The Code is Red..." represented by two tracks, "Smear Campaign" and "Time Waits for No Slave" each represented by three tracks, "Utilitarian" represented by four tracks, and "Apex Predator - Easy Meat" represented by a whopping six tracks. Only some of the "Apex Predator" songs can be considered as lacking compared with the rest, with "Critical Gluttonous Mass" and more so "Caste as Waste" being the offenders (the latter in particular is one of those modern "atmospheric" ND tracks that attempts to set a mood, and in this particular case is mostly a dud). Otherwise, everything is really good, from a short hardcore cover like "Crash the Pose", to a slow ND song that has seriously grown on me with every listen in "Atheist Runt", to monster slabs of ND's modern deathmetalgrindcore in tunes like "Losers", "Call That an Option?", "Suppressed Hunger", "Everything in Mono", and "Oh So Pseudo".

The other 13 tracks are mostly pulled from split EPs and compilation appearances, and while they generally don't wow quite as much as the studio album bonus tracks, you're still fully aware that this is Napalm Death, and their songwriting quality generally holds in these as well. There is one more "atmospheric dud" that must be acknowledged in "Oxygen of Duplicity", but that is balanced with fast grindfests like "Legacy Was Yesterday", "Youth Offender", and "An Extract (Strip It Clean)". "To Go Off and Things" (a Cardiacs cover) must be mentioned in particular: I never imagined that Napalm Death would play a song filled with goofy keys, or that it could be good, but this is a perfect example of Napalm Death taking a song completely outside of their sphere/sound and molding it to make it their own (look up the original song first, I'd never heard of it or the Cardiacs at all before).

If I could change one thing, I would have released this compilation in chronological order of release, so the listener can hear the subtle evolution of Napalm Death over the decade of 2004 - 2014 (like it or not, we have to admit that Barney has had to rely somewhat more on vocal effects in recent years, which are lacking at least in the two "The Code Is Red..." offerings, and suddenly present in various degrees from "Smear Campaign" onward).

To conclude, if you're a fan of even just a couple of Napalm Death studio albums from 2005 and onward, this compilation is worth your money to get the bonus tracks that you may not currently own. I quite enjoy listening to the bonus tracks, and the "other songs" are still pretty good as well.