EXHUMED – Garbage Days Re-Regurgitated

As a fan of brutal metal (that I am), I can’t always say I’ve always been too keen on some aspects of ‘death metal’ nowadays.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll love it for its brutality (and its silly sense of humour), but sometimes musically, I just find it tired and old, rehashing a formula that didn’t need flogging anymore…
Some bands have decided not to sharpen their bloodied axe-heads since the days of Death, Obituary and Deicide being able to sell out bigger venues, some fans say that’s “true and best way to go, if they stay the same”…some will claim that it’s dull and lacks progression.

Whatever you say about Death Metal in the year 2005AD,
It’s still very much “dead and kicking”, with many of its prime-time bands becoming institutions now.
EXHUMED are one such institution, and like fellow ‘later-period’ death metal masters Mortician, Macabre and Regurgitated…
The dead keep coming back to serve us up another splatter-platter of shocking good fun.

This CD sees EXHUMED with (yet another) new line-up and forging ahead, hacking and slashing their way back into (and through) the hearts of extreme metal fans everywhere.

This album of covers, A great idea in principle by founder member (and only surviving original member) Matt Harvey, in his bid to solidify a new line-up for the ‘proper’ new album and subsequent tour (both due next year) by selecting a ‘choice cut’ of covers to mutilate and generally murder, to settle the line-up.

Among the ashes of this 30+ minute disc, EXHUMED have successfully ‘murdered’ Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter, made vast brutality improvements on tracks by old-school peers like Sheer Terror and Metallica and generally just done what the hell they wanted with tracks by UKHC legends GBH, devil-rockers Pentagram and tech-loons Sadus.
(Plus a handful of other bands that I…ashamedly know of as influences, but cannot find the original tunes to compare to…argh…)

My personal fave ‘slaughtering’ is Samhain track All Murder, All Fun, All Guts… A great tune originally for sheer silliness (that always makes me want to just…well...kill!) taken to new levels of inanity by these modern day death-wielding yanks.

The new line-up sounds great, new guitarist Wes Caverly is a dab hand at the melodic solo, sweeping and shredding his way through the tunes like a hot carving knife through a newly dead corpse.
Matt Harvey obviously is still Lord and Master of the EXHUMED camp with his rasping vocals and solid fretwork.
Tight but predictable thrashing drums and rumbling bass lend another hand to the culling of these old-school tracks.
The production is chaotic and nasty, just how US death metal fans like it.

I can safely say that I look forward to the new EXHUMED album with murder in mind and a nice new shiny axe to do some damage in the mosh-pit with…

A pretty fun stab at an album, but what it does do it give hope for a return to form for EXHUMED.
(Please excuse ALL the bad death-metal puns…I can’t help it!)