Exhumed: Gore legends on the road
Exhumed, the 1990s Gore Metal legends from San Jose, California, are about to release their 10th album named Red Asphalt (out February 20 via Relapse Records). Vocalist-guitarist Matt Harvey, not only the leading force of the group, but also the sole constant member, tells us more about it:
What inspires you to write your music?
Pretty much anything, really. I’ve never really experienced “writer’s block,” although I get to points in certain projects where I hit a wall. Usually going and doing something else creatively will help me come back and see the other project in a new light and keep going. I love the old style of Grinding Death Metal that we do, and it feels really natural to me, so when I pick up a guitar, that’s kind of what comes out.
Tell us about recording “Gore Metal”, your first album. What was the experience like? What were the sessions like?
The sessions were a bit fraught as we were really young and inexperienced. I think we needed some direction on how to work in the studio and how best to use our time and support each other through the process. Instead, we drank beer and made fart jokes. The engineer who did the record cut a lot of corners with the assumption that stuff would get straightened out during the mixing and mastering, but that ended up not being possible and it drove the mixing engineer, James Murphy (yes, the Death Metal guitar hero) up a wall. I don’t think any of us left the studio thinking we had done the record we wanted, even though all of the band members wanted quite different things out of the record.
Why did Exhumed take a break in 2005 and reform in 2010?
The band’s line-up wasn’t stable and we were getting a lot of tour offers. We had fulfilled our contract with Relapse and the other guys from the first three records had left, so it seemed like a logical endpoint for the band. When we came back five or six years later, we were able to get a much better handle on the business / touring side of things and put together a comparatively stable line-up pretty quickly.
Why did the band choose to write about politics on “Necrocracy”?
We were in the middle of an election year, the Obama / Romney election, so that was everywhere in the zeitgeist during the writing process. I had recently read God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and that’s where I first heard the term “Necrocracy,” which kind of jumped off the page and burned itself into my brain. I used to be a publicist at Alternative Tentacles Records, so I was pretty steeped in Howard Zinn, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, et al. and with the overtaking of the public sector by corporations, there was plenty to write about. Of course, we’ve now managed to descend further into naked fascism, so the concerns of the Obama era almost seem quaint in hindsight.
Why did you choose to remove double bass sound on Slaughtercult?
I think there was just too much double bass on the Death Metal records of the time. I’m not super big on floods of double bass underneath riffs, and our drummer at the time, Col Jones, was never a super-fast double bass guy, so it seemed like a good idea to head in the opposite direction of what the bands around us were doing.
What has kept Exhumed going through many line-up changes?
Stubbornness? Usually the changes come gradually, even when the line-up dissolved after Anatomy is Destiny, it kind of disintegrated over a couple of years. I think if it all would have happened at once, the band probably would’ve split up by design and did some kind of farewell thing, but it just stumbled along for a while and eventually fell apart. Ultimately, I think we have grown to have a really good extended family of people involved with the band, many that have come and gone and returned, like Ross Sewage, Leon del Muerte, and Bud Burke, as well as people that came back to help us write To the Dead a few years back. At this point, none of us are getting any younger, but we all enjoy working together and relish the opportunities we have, which we’re very fortunate to have, honestly.
Could you tell us more about Red Asphalt? What was it like recording it? Why the road theme?
Recording the record was pretty fun and laid back. We knew we weren’t in a tremendous time-crunch, and Sebastian (Phillips, the ed.) and I both have full recording studios, so we handled the vast majority of stuff ourselves, until we got to the mixing and mastering phases. We put in a lot of hard work, but it was also good fun putting the record together and I’m always excited when Baz and Ross bring more material to the proceedings, which they both did this time around. The road theme made sense as that’s where we spend so much time – traveling between gigs is 90% of touring. There’s also no shortage of death, dismemberment and danger on the American highway, even though the open road is highly romanticized. There have been tons of great Rock tunes about the road, but not many (any?) Death Metal songs about it, so it seemed like a cool avenue (no pun intended) to explore. Once we had Red Asphalt as a title, the song ideas came fast and furious and we were off and running.
What does the future look like for Exhumed?
We’ll be bringing you all on the road with us this year – we’ve got tours lined up in the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and we’re just getting started, so look both ways on the road, because we’re just one wrong turn away!
Interview: John Wisniewski photos: Exhumed FB Bandcamp
