I LOVE THE SMELL OF NAPALM

This doesn't have anything to do with the recent blog/message-board foofaraw surrounding whether Stephin Merritt is a racist or not (hint: he's not), but it's worth reading nonetheless: an interview with Mark "Barney" Greenway, vocalist for Napalm Death, a band most knee-jerk lefty indie schlubs would probably never think was on their side of anything, politically. But they are. Napalm Death are to me exactly what Killing Joke are to their fans: a screamingly loud voice of articulate, proletarian rage and class awareness. And, of course, they're fucking brilliant musically, much better than KJ have ever been (even the new KJ disc, good as it is, can't touch Diatribes, itself the weakest/weirdest of Napalm's 1990s albums, never mind skull-crushers like Inside The Torn Apart, Words From The Exit Wound or Order Of The Leech).