Trollheart

Well, Metal Month would not be Metal Month without our four trips to that realm of randomness, that citadel of chance, that mansion of maybe that rebuffs my attempts as often as I've been turned down for dates. Hopefully, this being Metal Month and all, the Gods of Metal will be happy with me and will treat me kindly, showering me with decent bands (or at least bands I can review) and few if any refusals. Here's hoping, as we make our first visit of Metal Month III to


Okay, perhaps the Metal Gods did not hear me. This is Metal Month III. I am doing your bidding. A whole month devoted to the best metal of all --- heavy --- and this is what you start me off with? Seriously?

What's wrong with them? You want a list? First of all, Panikroham are from Hungary. Hun-ga-ry. They are unsigned. Not only are they unsigned, they only have a fucking five-track demo to their name. Not only that, the fucking five-track demo in question is not available! Completely useless. Here, let me sacrifice this poseur virgin to you, and see if we get better luck on our second attempt.

Oh-kay! Looks like that did the trick! Thank you! I;ve actually heard of these guys, and I can see they have albums --- not demo tapes, not CD-Rs, not EPs, but proper albums. And a lot of them too. Yep, they'll do just nicely.

Band Name: Exhumed
Nationality: American
Subgenre: Death Metal
Born: 1990
Status: Active
Albums: Gore Metal (1998), Slaughtercult (2000), Anatomy is Destiny (2003), Garbage Days Re-Regurgitated (2005), All Guts, No Glory (2011), Necrocracy (2013)
Live albums: None
Collections/Anthologies/ Boxsets: Platters of Splatter (2004), Gore Metal: A Necrospective 1998-2015 (2015)
Lineup: (current) Matt Harvey (Guitar, Vocals) (F)
Bud Burke (Guitar, Vocals)
Matt Ferri (Bass, Vocals)
Michael Hamilton (Drums)


Well, I asked for it and I got it. I've suffered what I would call some pretty intense bands in this series but I feel this will in fact tax me more. Not only do Exhumed play what they call “old school death metal”, eschewing the more technical aspects as not being their thing, their lyrics concentate on horror and gore, and human body parts. Lovely. They got going in 1990, when founder and only remaining original member Matt Harvey was a fresh-faced fifteen-year old (!) and spent almost the next ten years issuing demos, Eps, splits, leading to their first proper album only hitting the shelves in 1998. Influenced by raw acts like Carcass, Terrorizer, Repulsion and some early Entombed (from whom perhaps Harvey got the idea for the band name), their early sound had a lot of grindcore in it also (so we won't be looking into their debut then) but their sound seems to have matured and developed as the years went on. Well, I read that it did, but I'm expecting it'll be mostly just noise and power and violence really, but we'll see.

The album I've chosen from their catalogue (the thrill of for once having a choice as to which album to listen to, not just taking the only one there is and then searching to see if I can actually find it!) is one which is said to be their most acclaimed, and comes around the midpoint of their career.

Anatomy is Destiny --- Exhumed --- 2003 (Relapse Records)

Following this album, co-founder and bass player Bud Jones left the band, which seems to have impacted badly on Harvey initially, and led to a hiatus after they put out a covers album, with a reunion and a new album in 2010. There's a short instrumental, the title track in fact, mostly a rising guitar riff and melody before we explode into “Waxwork” as the guitars shriek and howl, and everything goes to hell. No surprise there then. If this is what's seen as “melodic” by this band I shudder to think what the debut was like! Anyhoo, there's a scream from Harvey, then the vocal begins. To be fair, it's almost intelligible but not quite, so let's take a goosey at the lyric sheet. Well yeah that's interesting. Kind of a John Christie idea here: people killed and then preserved as living (dead) waxworks. I like the line ”Mouths agape with terror but breathless to scream” and his dark warning to onlookers: ”If their eyes seem to follow your gaze as you gawk/ Know that in the eyes of the dead, in their shadow you walk.” Creepy.

Exhumed seem to use a strange but effective vocal style, with what I assume is Harvey's voice hissing and shrieking, while another voice (no idea whose) has a dark, deep, throaty growl that is completely impossible to interpret. Works quite well though. This guy can really write lyrics too, and it's surprising that there are so many lines for so short a song, but to ignore the lyrics does Harvey a disservice, and though I suspect some will make me very queasy I do want to try to read them if I can. I love how he nods to Nietzsche when he growls ”Take care not to stare into their eyes/ Whatever you do/ When you look deep into death/ It sees back into you too.” It's a pretty horrifying portrayal of a serial killer who has some very different ideas about preserving his victims, and I must say it's a surprise to see lyrics of this depth in what seems on the surface just a pounding, thrashing death metal song.

“The matter of splatter” doesn't have too much to offer me personally, with its list of definitions of different terms to do with gore obsession I suppose, and it's another breakneck speed track, though it does slow down a little but not for long. Pretty nice solo coming up now, nice to hear. Not too much for me in “Under the knife” either; the lyric is a little visceral for me, though I do admit I like the way he couches the act as a dance. A dark, macabre one to be sure, and I like the line ”May I have this last dance/ As I take your last breath?” Very clever, but the music does nothing for me I'm afraid. I have to compliment Harvey though on his hilarious dark humour in “Consuming impulse”, where he makes the truly horrendous idea of someone being force-fed their own flesh truly funny. Just listen to the poetry and satire in lines like ”You truly are what you eat” not to mention ”What's eating you?” and my favourite ”Severed and severely served on a platter of splatter" and you can't help but laugh.

If it wasn't for the lyrics I'd be discounting this as just crass, fast, brutal noise, but I'm really getting this guy's humour (unlike in the song, where he's getting the guy's humerus! Oh, I can do it too you know! Yes, I'll stop now) --- oh dear god! ”Sometimes survival will cost you an arm and a leg!” This is fucking priceless! Oh wait! There was a bit of melody stealing in about halfway through “Grotesqueries”, which unfortunately is not as funny as the previous track, since it kind of uses the same idea in the lyric. Someone find that melody and flay it! There, it's gone. Fuck it: where's it think it is? A Motorhead song? Right, back to the aimless thrashing. I do like the line ”We grind our bones to dust every futile step we take”: well written. Oh, there's a solo there at the end, not bad.

This verse in “In the name of gore” is so good I have to reprint it all. The rhyming is just amazing! ”In the name of gore, we'll set right this bloody score/ The grave can't hold us anymore,/ We'll kick in the mausoleum doors/ Even sicker than before, we enjoy this gruesome chore/ Revealing the ghastly horror, the face of death that you deplore/ Rotting through the core, this slaughterous carnage you abhor/ Is the vocation we adore, as we drain another oozing sore/ Bringing revulsion to the fore, as the vomit stains on the floor/ Foreevermore -in the name of gore!”

Look, can someone PLEASE track that bloody melodic bit down and rip its heart out? I thought we chased it off before but it's fucking back again and it's ruining our song. THANK you! Oh come on now! You have to give props to a song who opening word is FUCK! For no apparent reason. “Arclight” is, of course, just like the seven tracks before it, though someone rolled off a bit of a drum solo there and now someone has ideas about doing the same on guitar. And the dark humour raises its crazed head again on “Nativity obscene – a nursery chyme” as it seems Harvey takes on the serious matter of stillborn childbirth, or possibly abortion, or maybe both, or neither. No, it's definitely stillborn birth. The usage of a children's choir singing ”Hush little baby don't say a word/ Mama's gonna have to get a casket reserved/ But if your body is too decomposed/ The coffin door will have to stay closed” almost made me piss myself with laughter. I know, I'm a bad person. But come on, tell me that you don't see ghoulish humour in ”When the water breaks, the cradle will rot/ A nursery chyme with no happy ending/ Left in the wastebasket, dead and forgot”?

That pesky melody just won't die! It's back in a really quite nice guitar run, but it soon runs off and hides before it's found. That's kind of the end of the humour though. “Death walks behind you” is a frenetic, visceral rendering of Iron Maiden's “Killers” in lyrical content, while there is some very clever usage of words in the final, and longest, track (seven minutes: can you believe it?) “A song for the dead”. Though insightful and well-written, I just find reading the lyric too depressing, and I'm not really in a mood to be depressed, so let's just leave it at that. What? The music? Oh yeah...

Well it starts off promisingly for about three or four seconds, when it sounds like there's actually a keyboard going, then punches up into, in fairness, a pretty good guitar solo, but this soon disappears under the usual guitar and drum assault, though we do get some sort of melody about halfway on the guitar. They thought it was dead, but it crept back in on broken knees, now it's being dragged backwards screaming and clawing the ground with its fingernails, and I think we all know what its final destiny is going to be. I suppose the only thing you can say about this kind of music is that even a relatively long song flies in really quickly, so you don't have to endure it for as long as say a funeral doom metal song.

Oh wait! There in the fifth minute the children's choir coming back in, and something like a flute as everything --- guitar, drums, vocals --- all drop completely away, and we're left with a kind of repeating screech on what I guess is the guitar, then a slow, doomy passage to take it to its end. Interesting. Did not expect that.

TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS

1. Anatomy is destiny
2. Waxwork
3. The matter of splatter
4. Under the knife
5. Consuming impulse
6. Grotesqueries
7. In the name of gore
8. Arclight
9. Nativity obscene (A nursery chyme)
10. Death walks behind you
11. A song for the dead

Nobody will be in the least surprised, I'm sure, to hear that this kind of music is not my cup of tea at all. It's too fast and too frenetic, but at least looking into the lyrics has allowed me to appreciate these guys (or at least, their songwriter) a lot more than I would otherwise have done. He certainly has a great handle on dark humour, and I can see how, when he mentions that often the gore in his lyrics is allegorical and metaphorical, that works very well, particularly in the likes of “Consuming impulse”, where he's obviously talking about a society feeding on itself and unable to stop. Good stuff.

Musically though, no. Nothing really to talk about there. All the ratings above, bar the introductory instrumental, are awarded based on what I thought of the lyrics, as I really can't rate the music, or if I did, everything would be red. Which would probably suit Matt Harvey, come to think of it....

All of which rather surprisingly to me earns this album a solid rating of

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018