EXHUMED

EXHUMED – “To the Dead”

by Thor

San Jose, California’s OG death machine EXHUMED is back with “To the Dead,” a full-length album of gnarly death metal comfort food like a sloppy soup kettle full of rank, fly-infested viscera. It’s truly yummy stuff.

Guitarist/vocalist Matt Harvey’s band has been churning out the guts for over thirty years now. And if you’re not in the know, EXHUMED is a band that knows exactly what it’s doing and does it extremely well. No more, no less. They’re similar to thrash metal’s MUNICIPAL WASTE in that they’re prolific, hilarious, true road dogs, and they understand their genre better than their peers do. It’s that simple, and the results speak for themselves. Well, the results vacillate between guttural bellows and banshee shrieks, as it were, but you get the idea.

On “To the Dead” the band bashes out 10 tracks of blistering, sinister death metal including catchy little ditties like “Putrescine and Cadaverine,” “Drained of Color,” “Necrotica,” and “Defecated.”

Vocally, the band utilizes the tried-and-true dual assault—a good cop, bad cop approach featuring beastly gutturals (Ross Sewage) juxtaposed by piercing shrieks (Harvey) while the music is comprised of a cacophony of fat, fast riffs ripping through the speakers like a chainsaw. This is all delivered on a deathbed of blast beats and d-beats courtesy of longtime Cali skinsman Mike Hamilton (DEEDS OF FLESH, ex-VILE). And despite an almost total dearth of groove or even mid-tempo passages, the result is still an immanently listenable collection of true metal bangers that sound big and mean.

For fans of death metal and grindcore alike, EXHUMED’s “To the Dead” is as close to a sure thing as I’ve heard this year. Go get it, Wormsters!

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EXHUMED