Utilitarian

Utilitarian was released by Century Media on 27 February 2012 in Europe and a day later in North America. It was recorded and mixed between May and November 2011 at Parlour Studios in Kettering, Northamptonshire, where Russ Russell produced, recorded, engineered, mixed and mastered it. The line-up was Barney Greenway on vocals, Shane Embury on bass, Mitch Harris on guitar and Danny Herrera on drums, and the cover is the work of the Danish artist Frode Sylthe. There are sixteen songs. On the third, "Everyday Pox", the avant-garde composer and saxophonist John Zorn plays saxophone. Greenway said that when the band played the track back in the studio, Embury felt it needed a saxophone and got in touch with Zorn, an old associate of the band; the part was recorded at East Side Sound in New York. Mitch Harris wrote both the music and the words of "The Wolf I Feed", and his own voice carries much of it. Greenway called that an accident: so much was written in a short space towards the end of the sessions that there was no time to go through the song together beforehand, so Mitch Harris laid down a guide vocal first. The title refers to utilitarianism, which Greenway said he used to draw a parallel rather than as a tribute. The Occupy movement spread while the album was being recorded in 2011; he felt in sympathy with it, though the timing was a coincidence, and before the release the band opened an "Occupy Napalm" page on Facebook in support of the movement. The standard CD (Century Media 9981652) holds the sixteen songs. A limited digipak added "Aim Without an Aim" and "Everything in Mono", the North American CD added "Everything in Mono" alone, and the double LP carried both of those and "Standardization" as well, nineteen tracks in all. "Analysis Paralysis" also came out as a limited seven-inch, with "Youth Offender", a track exclusive to that single, on the B-side. The album spent one week on the UK Official Rock & Metal Albums Chart, at number 10.