Live Review: Napalm Death, Corporation, Sheffield

We are at Corporation in Sheffield for an absolute ear-shredding, blood-pumping, headbanging exercise in total catharsis! The reigning titans of extreme music, Napalm Death, are in town, and they have brought with them the best and most thrilling names in boundary-pushing, tinnitus-inducing metal for their “Campaign For Musical Destruction” Tour. We are literally shaking with anticipation for tonight’s carnage. Four bands sometimes seem like a lot, but this? This will probably be over before we even know what has happened!

Wormrot

Bass player less onstage but packing plenty of low end anyway. Wormrot lose none of their feral fury with founding guitarist Rasyid Juraimi, stand-in frontman Gabriel Dubko from Implore and their powerhouse drummer, Vijesh Ghariwala. Vijesh is a frenetic ball of energy that just has to be witnessed live, his arms whipping around the kit uniquely. He has tricks in his repertoire that we have never seen before; technique-wise, it’s utterly hypnotic. The sum of these few parts is enough to whip us into a raw grindcore frenzy. Wormrot are so much more than a grindcore band, and their wild experimentalism shines through as they plunder tracks from their phenomenal ‘Hiss’ and ‘Dirge’ albums. This is perfection in its rawest form; the audience are loving it and roaring their approval between tracks. For such a compact unit, they’re a true testament to how much space you can cover with boundless imagination and a willful disregard for boundaries and genre limitations. Wormrot are easily the best thing to happen to extreme metal since Nasum.

Primitive Man

This band is on a mission to be as heavy and morose as possible! Employing power electronics, only the slightest in the way of lighting and flapping down-tuned strings, Primitive Man brings doom-laden noise for the oncoming apocalypse. Blast Beats are delivered in short bursts out of the mire for fleeting passages, seemingly to mirror the sparse rays of light scanning the room. The band truly makes Wormrot sound positively sing-along by comparison. It’s all excellent, of course, and we love a bit of drone doom noise, but damn, is it harrowing! Fractured, droning soundscapes rumble and hiss, and we’re feeling the total weight of their two ominous-looking flight cases; these cases presumably contain electronic torture devices that punish circuit boards until they scream in agony. Everything here is heavy, and Primitive Man appears to be operating a scorched earth policy with their dual-man mountain attack bookending their central drummer. This is not about songs; this is about levelling the place, and that’s a job well done tonight!

Pig Destroyer

Pig Destroyer is a thing of myth and folklore; such is their legacy, and tonight, they are everything we had hoped for and more! Taking the stage to a technical difficulty, which is a very Pig Destroyer thing to do, the legendary Relapse golden years veterans waste no time in plundering their twisted, incredible discography, starting with ‘Gravedancer’ from 2004’s excellent ‘Terrifyer’ LP and carrying on with this album, for the following few tracks thus sending the audience utterly insane. The temperature in the venue increases by 100% as they tear through classics from Phantom Limb and Book Burner at lightning-fast speed. It’s blasting breakneck grinding with their keyboard player/noise technician serving as a hype man to the remarkable scene legend J.R. Hayes. The sound is utterly on point tonight. After Primitive Man has pummelled us into the ground, Pig Destroyer picks us back up and shakes the collective around. Most of us are in slack-jawed awe that we are witnessing true extreme metal royalty as they end by peeling off stone-cold killers from the peerless ‘Prowler In The Yard’. A surprise moment of joy and levity follows as they celebrate chief six-string mangler Scott Hull’s birthday onstage a day late (because he’d be wise to it on the day), complete with cake, balloons and candles! Then back to the blast beats, or you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a Party Cannon show. This is all fantastic fun and perfectly caps off this side of the show! We call them legends for a reason, Pig Destroyer utterly slay!!!

Napalm Death

There are a few things you can rely on to be consistently superb, and luckily, Napalm Death are one of those rare UK, I’ll say it, national fucking treasures that you just know are going to demolish this totally sold-out venue. Crashing in with ‘From Enslavement To Obliteration’, we are instantly whisked into the eye of a furious storm! The photographers are suddenly subject to a real-life performance of ‘Raining Men’ with entirely different music! Switching back and forth through the years, Napalm Death hit us with 22 certified history-making bangers, and the crowd surfers keep coming! It’s a race for us to snap these stone-cold icons before we abandon ship. Barney Greenway is in full berserker mode tonight; mind you, we’ve never seen him do anything else! Shane, well, Shane is up there with Ozzy when it comes to true Brummy legends in our eyes. Up close, the speed at which Embury’s fingers attack his bass is utterly astonishing. Classic after classic fire past at lightning speed, and before we know it, we’re several tracks, albums and decades in and holding on for dear life!

No matter how often you see Napalm Death, you’re still stunned that they’re actually there before you. We don’t fanboy a lot, but it still stuns us into double taking sometimes; we can’t believe we’re witnessing pure metal history in the flesh. Danny Herrera on Drums is an absolute machine as ever, and as I’ve said many times before, you can’t beat a band member with big, thick dreads. John Cooke also possesses even more prominent, thicker riffs! We’re fast running out of superlatives here, and if you’ve ever witnessed Napalm Death live, you know they just don’t do anything less than stunning performances. They pretty much always will play the best version of ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off!’ (Admit it, it’s the best version!) Tonight, they’re backed up with the best in the game as support acts; this is the most robust grind tour package we’ve seen since the Grind Crusher glory days! (Ask your Mum and Dad!) Every band tonight pays onstage tribute to the band who helped start this whole damn thing way back in the eighties. A furious racket made by disgruntled youths in a ramshackle pub in Birmingham under Thatcher’s government. A band with no other intention than to let the world know just how pissed off they were. All these years later, they’re still just as angry, only now they’re the grand masters, originators and pioneers of the craft!

As I say, Napalm Death are a total 100% national treasure, just don’t expect any knighthood offers or acceptances any time soon.