If you’re going to make music about chopping people up, it follows that you’ll leave a more lasting impression if you anchor your subject matter in real-life events. That’s surely the case with Death Revenge, the sixth full-length from long-running Northern California death metal/goregrind quartet Exhumed, but not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect. Inspired by a series of murders that took place in 19th-century Edinburgh, Death Revenge marks the first time that the band’s frontman and chief lyricist, Matt Harvey, has focused his obsession with mutilated bodies on a narrative that carries the weight of genuine tragedy. It works because Harvey—never one to take himself too seriously—approaches this material with a storyteller’s relish.
Since Exhumed formed almost 30 years ago, violence has been Harvey’s one and only topic of choice. You might expect him to have run out of new things to say on this subject, and it's often felt as though he has, notwithstanding the sociopolitical messages Harvey has talked about burying alongside the blood-spattered limbs that litter his songs. Musically, his approach has stuck closely to the blueprint set out by UK grindcore pioneers Carcass in the ’80s—but like most of that band’s followers, Harvey has had difficulty replicating the satirical wit in Carcass lyricist Jeff Walker’s anatomically graphic wordplay.
This time, he comes fairly close, thanks to a clever decision to present Death Revenge as goregrind’s answer to “Sweeney Todd.” By introducing a colorful cast of characters into the storyline, Harvey turns the gruesome tale behind the album into a delicious thrill ride. Hilariously, the lyric sheet is laid out as an opera program and even includes the credit “libretto by Matt Harvey.” He commits to this presentation even further by opening the album with a classical overture arranged by former Exhumed bassist Matt Widener (best known as the bassist and lyricist in Cretin, a grindcore act that eschews Exhumed’s slasher-film aesthetic for equally shock-driven psychological and body horror). The overture begins with an unmistakable tip of the hat to John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween theme before melodramatic violins take over. If you’ve watched a British-made period TV drama lately, the similarities are obvious. When the band tears in with its usual arsenal of chainsaw riffs, the effect is almost vulgar—guttural savagery intruding on the highbrow.
As always, the influence of Carcass looms large. Every Exhumed album, including this one, contains several moments where you can play a game of “name the Carcass tune this riff is based on.” By this point, though, Harvey and company have become adept at sequencing riffs into more than just a patchwork of references to songs they didn’t write. Death Revenge is a reminder that Exhumed was never meant to function as a tribute act, though they sometimes look like one.
For good measure, Harvey throws in references to Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and “War Ensemble,” showing the formative impact that thrash metal had on him. These slight downshifts provide a change of pace from the relentlessness of the blast beats. After many years of sticking to the same shtick at more or less the same frenzied tempo, Exhumed have arguably gotten more energetic, better at conserving their energy, and more deliberate about how one riff flows into the next. The pacing of Death Revenge is the element that most clearly sets it apart from both death metal convention and the band’s earlier work.
It helps that Harvey gives his mordant sense of humor room to shine for once, despite the grim reality the story is based on. In her 2011 study The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh’s Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes, author Lisa Rosner describes the killings in question as “the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper’s.” These events ultimately led to the U.K. parliament passing the Anatomy Act of 1832—which, of course, gets a playfully somber classical instrumental named after it here.
As the lyrics make clear, the Anatomy Murders were committed in order to supply black-market corpses for medical research. Harvey may or may not be commenting on the way modern market forces make mincemeat of us all when he growls, “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor six feet of sod a grave/So pray the lord your soul to take/You’ll need defenders of the grave/Hallmarks of this ghoulish age”—but you don’t need to read that far into this album to enjoy it. The murders have appeared in British nursery rhymes, and Harvey often takes a similar tone in talking about them on the new songs. Strangely, Death Revenge doesn’t make for an especially scary or even creepy experience. It’s artfully conceived, lurid fun that sees this band finally wringing some substance out of the same old blood and guts.
