Can you imagine working at NPR, sitting down at your regular-sized desk to report on politics, the environment, or science, and all of a sudden Napalm Death sets up shop at the Tiny Desk next door? Well, you’d just have to go check it out. And fortuitously, Napalm Death, who played a 19-minute set, espouse the same lefty politics as NPR, in fact maybe even a little more leftist, all things considered, since Barney Greenway wore a Crass T-shirt to the gig.
The long-running death metal and grindcore group, which put out a collaborative album with Melvins called Savage Imperial Death March last year, kept the proceedings short and bittersweet. Their set list drew three songs from their influential debut, Scum (fun fact: None of the band members in Napalm Death now played on that album), including their opening number, “Instinct of Survival,” and their parting shots, “Scum” and their Guinness World Record–awarded world’s shortest song, “You Suffer.” (The lyrics are “You suffer, but why?” which is really what NPR has been saying for years, right?)
Needless to say, the band understood the assignment. “Let me say, we are here to heartily support public access broadcasting,” Greenway told the office. “Unfortunately, it is under attack from all sides, in the U.K. as well as over here, and we have to take care of it. It’s precious. It has to be preserved.”
The rest of the set by the band, which includes guitarist John Cooke, bassist Matt Sheridan, and drummer Danny Herrerra, featured songs from their most recent solely Napalm Death full-length, Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, as well as Utilitarian (2012)and Time Waits for No Slave (2009). A nice treat came by way of “Dead” From Enslavement to Obliteration. Coffee, anyone?
