Exhumed – Red Asphalt Review

Ross Sewage closed a recent interview with a perfectly Exhumed response to a simple question: Asked to complete the sentence beginning with “Death metal is at its best…,” his answer was straight to the point: “when it’s fun.”

And, man, Exhumed is nothing if not fun.

From humbler beginnings through the early 90s as one of the earliest and best examples of what would eventually become (somewhat unfairly) maligned as “Carcass worship,” Exhumed spit forth a spate of split releases that reeked of putrefaction, before landing on their first full-length in 1998’s Gore Metal, before fully hitting their stride with the follow-ups, Slaughtercult and Anatomy Is Destiny. The former of those was (is) grindier, nastier, uglier, and the latter is more polished, precise, technical, and the middle one was just right.

Somewhere within that spectrum lies Exhumed’s beating heart – they’re a predominantly death metal band with grindcore strains throughout, blood-spattered and gore-soaked, vicious and violent, and always, ALWAYS fun. After a brief lay-off and partial reunion, through line-up shifts that saw founding drummer Col Jones depart and bassist / co-vocalist Sewage (gone since Gore Metal) return for Death Revenge and beyond, Exhumed soldiers ever onward, now on their ninth full-length of fresh meat.

To cut directly to the proverbial chase: Red Asphalt is, for the most part, business as usual for Exhumed. It’s catchy, carving death metal, with the Harvey-high / Sewage-low vocal interplay, and an appropriately filthy production that feels just polished enough to not wear the edges off. The riffs rip through tremolo-picked runs and groovier bits, with dashes of melody (though not as much as on some previous efforts). Lyrically built upon tales of life on the road – or really, more upon tales of death on the road – Red Asphalt is thematic, without being a concept album, similar to the VHS b-movie inspiration of Horror. The title track hits that perfect Exhumed stride: catchy guitar work, an immediate vocal hook, a midtempo bulldozer drive that upshifts into thrashing glee. More of those sweet melodic guitar leads appear in “The Iron Graveyard,” with others cropping up throughout – in “Signal Thirty,” in “Symphorophilia,” everywhere – and with each repeated listen (and there have been many so far, and more to come), I’m reminded that those big bloody meathook-sized earworms are Exhumed’s true calling cards, lancing through the eardrums and right into the brain, never to work itself free.

Of course, with any Exhumed album, at this point, the question is not so much “what are we getting here?” but “how does what we’re getting here compare to what we’ve gotten before?” and the answer is “quite well, actually.” I’d place Red Asphalt above To The Dead, which I very much enjoyed, and soundly above Horror, which I also very much enjoyed. Everything this band does will immediately be compared to that first run of three, those classics of gore metal, to the extent that it’s almost irrelevant if Red Asphalt lives up to Slaughtercult, as long as it lives up to the band’s logo on the cover, and it certainly does that.

This is Exhumed; this is death metal (mostly); and like the man said, this is fun.