(Here we have DGR’s review of the latest album from Exhumed, which is out now on Relapse Records.)
When you start writing you assume you won’t ever be on the journalistic “beat” of some bands, yet somehow you seem to fall into a routine and over time wind up covering their releases far more than you’d expect. For this writer, Bay Area death metal veterans Exhumed are one such band. Such a long-running hallmark of an act isn’t one you’d expect to be continually checking in with, as they’ve been able to develop a large enough catalogue of music that they could coast for a lifetime bouncing between albums they put out up to a decade ago.
Yet the crew behind Exhumed remain fiercely creative and infected with an inability to sit still for even a second, spreading themselves far and wide among a baker’s dozen of projects and even then still finding time to launch the occasional new one, and then somehow after all of that… loop back around to Exhumed. Even when they share lineups among other different projects, it seems that the foundational spirit of the band still calls to them as something to be unified around.
Exhumed have traversed many a different genre within their subset of the death metal spectrum over the years as well. Having existed as a viscerally grotesque goregrind act, or when death and thrash metal were bridging the gap to one another, as well as being one of the pillars of the grind-infected side of that sound, it is difficult to pick and choose across death metal’s many different styles as the genre has grown and expanded outward over the years and not find a point at which Exhumed have touched ground.
It is well enough then that the band’s ambitions remain large as well, as Exhumed have jumped from concept albums to straightforward grindcore parties to something in between – which seems to be a solid comfort zone for them – and are currently operating as a sort of death metal time machine, conjuring up pop-culture specters or a throwback that hits hard enough that your neck snaps in the process. They craft albums out of whatever muse may strike them at the moment, which seems to be the only way we can truly chart a career that has remained on a fairly consistent three-to-four year clip in terms of full-length releases but has gone from the overly decadent conceptual works of Death Revenge, to the grindcore massacre of Horror, to the album that had the Herculean task of splitting the difference in To The Dead, and on to the subject of today’s written butchery – Red Asphalt. All this while keeping in mind that the ground covered across these four discs has been just a hair over a decade’s worth.
Rest assured, Exhumed being the creatures of habit they are, even though their artistic tendrils reach out as far as they can get them, Red Asphalt still sounds plenty like an Exhumed disc. The high and low multi-directional vocal attack remains fully intact no matter what the situation throughout the album, and the continual no-bullshit writing style that Exhumed have turned into a musical scalpel blade is still there. They hit surgically fast and with purpose, perpetually blasting their way through a variety of three-to-four-minute blood baths. At no point could you argue that Exhumed are being indulgent on Red Asphalt.
This is an album that, much like its first song, may in fact be “Unsafe At Any Speed”. Of the many old sayings that we’ve clawed out of the smoke of a million burning ritual fires around here, the idea that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach continually comes to mind, if not just because the other competitor may be through listening to Exhumed, because when the machine is truly in operational form, as the riffs get more ferocious, as the vocal layers stack on top of one another, as snare drum after snare drum gets shredded into pieces, and some truly disgusting bass-guitar tone seems to bubble its way to the top, Exhumed become a creature that is hard to deny, and you almost want to settle into it like a nice, comfy, intestine strewn, death-and-grind recliner.
Exhumed have their reliable aspects but one of the nicer surprises about this particular brand of gore is the heft that is behind the songwriting here. They have been working their way into this evolutionary path for a bit, so even though it may seem like Red Asphalt is a total piss-take on the classic driver’s ed curriculum video and the various gore-soaked accidents that went alongside it, there’s more room given to the groove-filled side of death metal than the knife-sharp attack Exhumed have been experts at over the years.
If you’re looking for disgusting bass-guitar tone to back up the guitar assault then Red Asphalt pretty much lays that all out on the concrete early on. They’ve become more all-encompassing for this particular album. They’re still well within the no bullshit wheelhouse of death metal attack, with many of the songs wasting no time keeping to the three minute or less mark, but there’s a few slow-churning monsters in the mix as well, to keep things from getting dull. The titular “Red Asphalt” for instance moves through a surprising number of dynamics, but considering that over four and a half minutes is indulgent for Exhumed these days, it’s to be expected that they’d fill it to the brim – whether it’s the surprisingly catchy opening melodic line, mean guitar solos, or the neck-snapping tempo changes the song goes through. Sometimes you listen to an album and have the knowing moment of “ah, I see why this wound up as the title track”, and you could understand “Red Asphalt” going to battle with quite a few songs to take that crown.
The aforementioned slower songs rear their heads with great timing. “Shovelhead” sounds as if it sumbled out of a horror movie and is lumbering its way towards you after the head-biting attack of “Shock Trauma”, and later on in the album the back half of “Signal Thirty” segues out of a blisteringly fast batch of songs into a meatier rhythm riff that spills over into “Death On Four Wheels” as if they were halfway points between each song. “Death On Four Wheels” then flips the switch back to sprinter’s pace for its closing half when it isn’t in the sort of acid-washed musical nihilism that Demiricous once used as their calling card for a while. It’s a fun default mode bands will often drop into, and “Death On Four Wheels” is one of the better late-album ass-kickers to pop up in recent releases.
All of this is, of course, punctuated by a drum kit that is being beaten into absolute oblivion at times. Exhumed’s music lends itself well to a variety of approaches on a drum kit but the constant cymbal crashing and snare drum battering can at times sound more like someone in a twelve-round boxing match with the kit that just happens to be keeping rhythm with the band. It keeps things from getting too surgically precise and gives Exhumed an edge that sounds as if things may fall apart at any particular moment.
Over the years its been difficult not to appreciate the extra amount of effort that Exhumed have put into their music and everything surrounding it. They’re a combination mean-as-hell genre-hopper of a death metal band and community theater project. Nothing is done tongue-in-cheek because the tongue to place was lost a long time ago, likely bitten off. Exhumed releases provide the guys room to give in to goofball and nerdy aspects, and the band have played this up over the course of their career. It all seems so serious but the past few albums have been them just ripping the mask off and playing to the base instinct of this being primally stupid music, written because writing fast stuff is really fucking fun and blasting your way through it on the rhythm end or the multi-faceted and multi-fronted vocal attack swinging in from any direction keeps things exciting.
Red Asphalt is a particular combination of high-speed madness and precision assault, with Exhumed somehow hanging on to keep the machine from flailing its parts into the next few counties over. It is chaotic fun and ridiculously headbang worthy.
https://www.relapse.com/pages/exhumed-red-asphalt
https://orcd.co/exhumed
https://exhumed.bandcamp.com/album/red-asphalt
https://www.facebook.com/exhumedofficial