Poison Tongues – Exhumed

In this bimonthly column, staff writer Doug Moore takes a very close look at extreme metal lyrics. Some will be serious, some will be silly, but they’ll all go under the microscope.

David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, once observed that for every two Jews there are three opinions. This old saw applies to metalheads, too. (Sorry, NSBM jackoffs.)

Take death metal, for instance. Depending on who you ask, death metal should be either primal, knuckle-dragging chaos noise or dizzying modern chamber music. These two factions rarely agree, and they’ve produced a tired debate that I’ve done plenty to perpetuate. (Sorry, everybody else.)

But in reality, death metal’s brainy and primitive sides aren’t mutually exclusive. One person can embody them both. Matt Harvey of Exhumed does so.

On one hand, Exhumed has always been a genre exercise. Harvey openly disdains progression, focuses his songwriting around choruses, and wears his classic death and thrash influences on his sleeve. On the other, he is a sophisticated musician and a very smart guy. Check out, for instance, his in-depth analysis of Death‘s “Left to Die” at NPR. (If you want more where that came from, he wrote an even more exhaustive breakdown of Metallica‘s “Trapped Under Ice” for Invisible Oranges.)

Or you could check out his impressive lyrics. “Grotesqueries,” from the band’s opus Anatomy is Destiny, is an excellent example:

When people deride death metal, they often mention the lyrics—brainless, sexist gore fantasies. But Harvey uses death and decay as a prism for examining a whole host of issues. As he said himself:

“One thing I like about gore is that it gives you a set of aesthetics to work with to use as an allegory or metaphor. Even as far back as the first album, a lot of the songs are metaphors for different things. We have songs about consumerism and songs about relationships and songs about politics. Instead of me coming off like a whiny bitch complaining about society, I’m able to put it across in a way that’s really allegorical and has its own entertainment value without having any deeper context. As evidenced by this interview, I can be pretty wordy…unnecessarily. So the gore metaphor keeps me from becoming a preachy, pretentious douchebag.”

So it is for “Grotesqueries”—there’s a lot going on in this song. But before we look at the meaning, let’s review Harvey’s self-professed wordiness.

He wastes no time proving that he’s smarter than your average bear. “Grotesqueries” gets off to an unusual lyrical start for a death metal tune. It opens with a Shakespeare allusion: “All the world’s indeed a corpse, and we are merely maggots” repurposes the famous “All the world’s a stage/And the men and women merely players” from As You Like It.

And it’s not the only Shakespeare reference in the song—”this mortal coil” was popularized by Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue. Harvey shares the allusion with Carcass‘s Jeff Walker (via “This Mortal Coil” from Heartwork), one of Harvey’s chief influences and a noteworthy lyricist in his own right. At Shakespeare’s time, “coil” meant “conflict” or “struggle.” Very appropriate, given the rest of the lyrics.

Then there’s the wealth of 50-cent words scattered throughout the lyrics: sycophants, enamored, chyme, grume, fetid, tripe, offal, eschatological, menagerie, surcease. These are the stuff that high school vocab tests are made of. My personal favorite is trompe l’oeil—a type of optical illusion that painters use to make two-dimensional works appear three-dimensional. Harvey takes these terminological excesses to their apex on “The Matter of Splatter,” also from Anatomy is Destiny.

…Musically, “Grotesqueries” delivers familiar riffs with uncommon dexterity. Lyrically, it does the same with ideas. Harvey’s describing a common perspective (in the metal world at least), but he sees it through his own pus-tinted lenses.

Human beings view themselves as dignified creatures, but in practice our lives are decidedly icky. Much of that ickyness is physical, rooted in our corporeal wetwork: “Dissecting ourselves to find nothing alive/Just a mass of perversely animated pieces/Nothing within worthwhile to revive/We’re mired knee-deep in our own fetid feces.” Eating, shitting, breathing, fucking, and our other bodily functions are all pretty gross if you think about them, but we pursue them enthusiastically nonetheless.

Harvey spends a lot of time on this notion, focusing especially on consumption and waste: “Feeding off each other’s regurgitation”;  “Gorging our gnawing jaws with our own pathological waste”; “we gorge ourselves on all the tripe and offal we can intake”. Consumption here need not mean eating, and waste need not mean poop—Harvey seems to be speaking more generally of consumerism and wastefulness.

To him, these processes serve to distract us from a cosmic truth: “Consumer or consumed/We all end up as chyme and grume.” Chyme is partially digested food; grume is clotted blood—foul component pieces of the biological whole. No matter how caught up in hedonism we get, Harvey says, we’re only distracting ourselves from our onrushing deaths. And we bring death closer just by going about our business: “We grind our own bones into dust each futile step we take.”

You’ve no doubt heard this worldview expressed in metal before: humans are vile creatures who engage in lots of repugnant behaviors to block out our knowledge of our own mortality. It’s an old notion, just as most of Exhumed’s musical framework is pretty old at this point—nearly rotten, in fact. But decay metaphors aside, it sounds pretty fresh when Matt Harvey talks about it:

“Asphyxiated by this mortal coil/Reaping rancid fruits long since despoiled/Until our depraved lives at last surcease/We’ll hunger for more grotesqueries…”

Posted by Old Guard

The retired elite of LastRites/MetalReview.

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