(A group of us NCS scribblers, including DGR, are currently at Maryland Deathfest. DGR wrote a bunch of reviews in advance so we’d have something to post while partying. The one below is one of those, and it seemed fitting to post it today since DGR ventured out last night in time to catch Napalm Death’s performance at the MDF pre-fest. He hasn’t been seen today, so far.)
Of the many releases that have hit within the first half of the year one of the ones that has been the most curious to me has been the release of the collaboration album Savage Imperial Death March among members of The Melvins and Napalm Death.
While it had been released as part of their tour together at the time of recording, this year’s digital unleashing of the album alongside a few added tracks is likely the first time many metalheads and those of us unfortunate enough not to live in a big touring market will get a chance to hear this combining of the brain-stems between the two bands.
Likely, it is also the first time many of us will either be exposed to (or even writing about) the Melvins collective themselves, long-running and label-avoiding by sheer determination, somewhere between noise-rock, grunge, all things avant-garde, and heavy metal at times. They have had a multitude of releases to their name over the course of an impressively lengthy career. It is a sort of stubbornness that you can’t help but admire.
Napalm Death are one of a few bands out there who could so easily hang with them on the release front, but they’ve embraced their grindcore label and philosophy with their biggest “sound shifts” happening in waves, such as the deathgrind output of the mid ’90s to the resurgent ferocity of the early ’00s to their current back-to-basics hardcore-punk-inspired wave of music.
Like yours truly, it is highly likely that many of us will have far more experience with Scum, The Code is Red, and Inside The Torn Apart than we will Gluey Porch Treatments, Honky, or The Bootlicker in our corner of the internet in spite of our PNW-based locale. That doesn’t mean a complete unfamiliarity for many of us with those whom Napalm Death have teamed up with here, though again, the Melvins auteurs have crossed so many genre lines and done so many collaborations that they truly are their own “thing”.
That, and for a genre such as ours so obsessed with hair, Buzz Osborne has been a titan of the industry-adjacent musically, but respect crosses so many lines when you have something so close to looking as if instead of yanking the toddler away from having stuck a fork in an electrical socket, the parents left it in because they were excited they’d finally have some peace and quiet in a few minutes.
With as vast a catalog as both these bands have, you could just easily and bravely state in our case that we’re not tremendous experts in either.
The discussion to be had with collab releases though is often who “wins out” when it comes to the overall atmosphere and writing style that dominates the album. It’s more difficult to track down the completely-tied-together collaboration releases that’ve come out, wherein it does feel like both groups are working together. More often, these releases can play out as if one band took command and the other group was just excited to be along for the ride, adding in wherever they could.
In the case of Savage Imperial Death March it is definitely the latter case in play, which is why we are so heavily focused on the partners of the album that the Napalm Death crew (Barney, John, and Shane) have teamed up with here, because this is less a full-bore grind album (or even bass-dominant punk and hardcore release in the way Throes Of Joy In The Jaws Of Defeatism was) than a noise-rock-to-full-blown-noise collision.
Napalm Death have experimented quite a bit with this sound before, and Shane Embury on his own solo works has been ensconced within it for even longer. In its current form it doesn’t seem as if Napalm Death wouldn’t be excited to join in for something like Savage Imperial Death March, even if the blastbeat-worthy segments feel so much further between than the actual distance between Napalm Death releases are on their own.
The Melvins conspirators are the first billing on this release not just because of alphabetical order choices but because they lay down most of the blueprint and fill in the foundation for nearly every song here.
Savage Imperial Death March does score points on multiple fronts for freeing up the Napalm Death crew to dive full-bore into their noisier inspirations. If you’ve been following their releases over the past couple, you’ve likely noted that in between the head-on assault that the band are known for there’ve been more and more odd and angular experiments creeping their way into the tracklisting: playing with different static implementations, long droning industrial bits, introductory segments consisting of loop over loop, songs that seem to collapse on themselves before they obtain any level of cohesion.
Having them combined with the Melvins makes sense in that way, because even a song like opening number “Tossing Coins Into The Fountain of Fuck” sounds like the combined grouping of the two bands are barely hanging on to the opening rhythm riff as it thrashes about like a snake pinned to the ground. It’s not a neckbreakingly fast song by any means, which opens room for multiple guitar solos to scream their way in, some sub-three seconds even before the next verse of Barney yelling his lungs out at you steps back into the front.
The way the song brings the drums and guitars up front, though, sounds as if there was a constantly shifting spotlight on who would be doing what within the song. It is lively, and charmingly imperfect. But you would assume the goal between two bands judging by its opening number was to create an arduously cohesive mess.
That combined chaos carries through much of Savage Imperial Death March; following song “Some Kind Of Antichrist” is a hair under nine and a half minutes long and continually loops its way back to the opening guitar part that bounces back and forth. A multitude of effects and interchanged vocals tumble over each other throughout the course of the song, seemingly conventional at first were it not for the yelling backing vocals and then the immense effects wall and jam segment that is the backing six minutes of the song.
The transition is obvious enough that it could’ve been broken out into a separate song but it’s difficult not to walk away from your first couple listens of this combo-ed release as if it were a blur and a fever dream. It is never not teetering on the edge of strange. Odd choices are made for the sake of a challenge – the middle few songs of this release angle themselves between obfuscated traditional numbers and drifting dreamlike sequences of nightmare noise.
You can imagine alternate-universe takes of a few songs in the middle of this attack on the senses becoming songs that would play well as solo works from either of these groups. Just a little fine tuning and “Nine Days Of Rain” becomes one of those aforementioned groove-heavy experiments by Napalm Death. Melvins could easily take “Awful Handwriting”, not even announce it in the middle of a set, barely change anything, and play it, and people wouldn’t even be phased.
A song like “Rip The God” so late in the Savage Imperial Death March journey is practically a doom song by comparison. Slow-tempoed and with multiple toys being deployed on top of the guitar rig makes for an intriguing chain of sound. That plodding pace carries through the five minutes of the song as it gets progressively heavier and heavier.
If there is one “trait” that this album develops by the time you reach its last few songs it is that it does chart a similar path through quite a few of the tracks. Either the song starts as a static-washed nightmare or it progressively becomes one. Any opportunity to have Barney yell at you about the state of things is always a good time but the sung vocal lines and screamed backing does get familiar.
“Stealing Horses” is almost like an oasis at that point because it is another one of those “either band could take this and work it into their live set and no one would guess” songs; it is violent enough to be a Napalm Death track and angular and bizarre enough that the Melvins guys could treat it as a quick hydration break played one-handed before heading back into their own material.
However, the one overriding arc of Savage Imperial Death March is going to be how abrasively bizarre it is. You can appreciate its determination to continually throw people for a loop because the philosophy running into this release seems to be that if you wanted something more conventional there are hundreds of bands doing that exact thing. This is an exorcism for Napalm Death and this is a fun-as-hell experiment for the Melvins. You can appreciate the chaos on an intellectual level, you can appreciate them opening on something deceptively heavy and then closing on an auditory hellscape like “Death Hour”.
Savage Imperial Death March was destined to be an odd-ball from the start and that is what it is. It is intriguing and magnetic, and the combination of the two groups is inspiring for its desire to challenge people at any state of its existence. It isn’t a fun party record in any way nor is it something to throw your arms around like a madman who has lost control of his motor functions in the pit, but Savage Imperial Death March is interesting for how determined it is to combo these two groups’ noisier ambitions together into a barely cohesive insanity.
https://themelvins.lnk.to/savage
https://melvinsofficial.bandcamp.com/album/savage-imperial-death-march
https://www.facebook.com/melvinsarmy
https://www.facebook.com/officialnapalmdeath/