(Below is DGR‘s review of a new EP by Exhumed, which is out now on Relapse Records.)
Still catching up on everything that has passed through the void between the two eardrums in the last few months. This is going to be a weird/wild journey by the time we call it.
Exhumed‘s sudden release of their new EP Beyond The Dead came as a pleasant surprise. Their album To The Dead ranked pretty high with yours truly, and just about any time the band are tearing through a bevy of death and thrash riffs with a high-low vocal interchange tends to leave us in a happy place.
Exhumed have traversed through a few genres over the year but always within a familiar heirarchy; that a band calling themselves Exhumed are familiar with the worlds of deathgrind and goregrind should come as no surprise. Beyond The Dead comes from the grindcore songwriting philosophy of sudden-appearance/sudden-exit, and that includes the way Beyond The Dead appeared, with the band releasing it at the tail end of August just as they were gearing up to hit the road.
Comprising three new songs, one previous stealth-single, and four live tracks dragged out of the vault, Beyond The Dead punches in at around twenty-six and a half minutes of music. The three new songs and “Sick At Heart” being more readily available are really what you’ll be here for because Exhumed have become models of consistency at this point in their career, so new music will effectively pick up right where To The Dead stopped in the same way their previous EP post their album Horror did.
Beyond The Dead tears out of the gates with “Lysergicide” and is the sort of track that immediately gives the fans – aka this dork here – exactly what they want. It’s a trademark for the band but it can’t be understated just how good Exhumed have gotten at the circle-pit riff with massive death metal howl. To The Dead was built near entirely out of this and “Lysergicide” continues the madness, with a handful of equally fast guitar solos and plenty of string-abuse for the first two or so minutes.
When they drop into a bass-heavy – yes, including some planet-rumbling and very prominent in the mix bass guitar – it is still more uptempo than you would expect. “Lysergicide” has a constant up-down motion to it that fits perfectly with the wall of blasts that appears behind its verses and the thrash-metal gallop that buttresses the rest of the song.
“Septic Five” on the other hand is fifty-five seconds and like a spike-bomb launched into a crowd. It calls to mind the VHS-soaked aesthetic of Horror and wraps up just as quickly as it started. If you weren’t paying attention and weren’t clued in at the sudden vocal shift, you’d think “Lysergicide” just got crushingly heavy out of nowhere to close things out.
Beyond The Dead never stops until you plow head-first into the live tracks that the band have clawed out of the dirt. “Rapid Unplanned Disassembly” and “Sick At Heart” – which had snuck out previously back in 2022 as part of Decibel’s Flexi series – both start just as fast as their siblings just prior to them did.
“Rapid Unplanned Disassembly” is propelled forward by sheer musical force and shares a lot in common with the opening song on Beyond The Dead; it just happens to be the blastbeat-heavier side of the coin, though Exhumed could easily play musical blender and just shuffle parts around and still come up with something pretty solid. If anything, the group’s digestible take on all things gore makes them one of the easier to translate-to-live bands out there, and you can hear it in every song.
They may never play anything from Beyond The Dead live, but damned if you can’t hear how purpose-built every guitar riff is to get some fool to start running in a circle for three minutes. Case in point: “Sick At Heart” right afterwards is another big slab of red meat for Exhumed fans and were it not frightening what said meat was made out of when it comes to Exhumed’s sewage dwelling, you’d have a pretty good musical barbecue with Beyond The Dead‘s first four tracks.
We’ve paid lip service to it already, but Exhumed saw fit to sweeten the deal of Beyond The Dead with four live cuts for the true completionist monsters out there. If you’ll allow a pulling back of the veil a bit, Exhumed are a band that I’ve always thought go over way better live than you could even imagine. They’re like Obituary in that sense. You can enjoy them a ton on album/ep/single but in live form they ascend to another level. You don’t even have to know the material well and you’ll have a damned good grasp on what they’re doing.
They’ve forged themselves into a hell of a live act and that only partially comes through on the slices available at the end of Beyond The Dead. You get live cuts of “Dysmorphic”, “Dead End”, “Slaughter Maniac”, and “In My Human Slaughterhouse” to add to the collection with Beyond The Dead, though the band are so scarily accurate in their songs at times that they near the sound of studio recording were it not for them seeming slightly more manic due to being a live setting.
An EP like Beyond The Dead is one of those where the clear headliners are going to be the newer tracks. Exhumed produced these with a reckless abandon to them and the songs sound like they’re freewheeling through musical chaos and loving every second of it. They don’t experiment with the band’s sound nor would it seem like this is one of those releases that hints at the band’s future – though if you had to guess, it’d probably be a refined and more violent take on To The Dead going by the four here – but is instead just more food for the ravenous horde.
Exhumed’s recent pattern of full-length, then EP, then a smattering of live stuff throughout while they seemingly never stop hitting the road – vocalist/guitarist Matt Harvey seems to be very good at getting out there with the variety of projects he’s a part of – continues, and Beyond The Dead adds to that growing stack of material. It’s a good addition to the To The Dead album run, but also a killer surprise given the suddenness with which it appeared.
https://orcd.co/beyondthedead
https://exhumed.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-the-dead-digital-ep
http://www.facebook.com/exhumedofficial