Napalm Death’s debut, Scum, is a landmark release in “extreme metal.” The world, to put it mildly, was not ready — when it came boiling out of England in 1987, the most insane record most metalheads had ever heard was Slayer’s Reign In Blood, which packed 10 furiously thrashing tracks into 28 minutes but still had verses, choruses, and guitar solos. Scum offers 28 tracks in 33 minutes, and one of them is the now-legendary “shortest song in the world,” the one-second “You Suffer.”

There’s actually a fair amount of dynamism here, though, at least on the first side. The album’s opening salvo, “Multinational Corporations”/”Instinct Of Survival,” starts off slow and ominous, basically a chanted refrain over cymbals, before the second half launches with an awesome punk-thrash riff. Similarly, the title track lurches back and forth between a doomy, almost Celtic Frost-ish verse riff and a blazing, Discharge-like chorus. And “Siege Of Power” is just fantastic — a grinding bulldozer of a riff, absolutely impossible not to headbang to. It’s no wonder the band re-recorded it later, with their current lineup.

The second half of Scum is a completely different story — which is no surprise, if you look at the album credits. In their early years, Napalm Death went through a lot of members in a fairly short time, and the two sides of Scum feature only one musician in common, drummer Mick Harris. On Side A, he’s joined by Nik Bullen on bass and vocals, and Justin Broadrick on guitar. On Side B, the lineup is Lee Dorrian on vocals, Bill Steer on guitar, and Jim Whitely on bass. By the time Side B was recorded, almost all the thrash and metal elements had been excised from their sound, leaving nothing but raw, noisy grind/punk. Most of the songs on the second half of Scum flash past in well under a minute; the longest is the 1:34 “M.A.D.” It’s literally the sound of young, pissed-off men bashing at their instruments and screaming their politics in your face as quickly and crudely as possible. There are a few good riffs (“Success?”, “Divine Death,” “M.A.D.”), but almost everything else just goes by too fast to make any impression beyond headlong fury. So while Scum is an incredibly important album, it’s not a great one.