EXHUMED - Postmortem Exhumation Of Debut Delivery Reveals Reason For Resurrection

February 17, 2015, 9 years ago

Greg Pratt

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EXHUMED - Postmortem Exhumation Of Debut Delivery Reveals Reason For Resurrection

When we catch up with Exhumed guitarist/vocalist Matt Harvey to talk about Gore Metal: A Necrospective 1998 - 2015, he's on the road on the way to the first stop on the band's tour with Napalm Death and Voivod. So the man is pumped, and he's also pumped about this new release, a double disc coming out on Relapse Records that finds the band completely re-recording their 1998 Gore Metal debut on disc one, with disc two being the classic splatter in all its raw glory. And, yeah, it's glory for those of us who have loved it since the day it came out, but when asked why the band decided to completely re-record it, Harvey is nothing if not honest.

"Why re-record Gore Metal? Have you heard Gore Metal? It sounds horrible," he chuckles.

Point taken: the original is muddy and underproduced; I mention to Harvey that when the blast beats kick in it pretty much becomes impossible to tell what's going on, and he laughs, all too familiar with an album he's lived with all these years but never been fully content with.

"I didn't feel like it was our best material at the time," he admits. "I didn't feel like it was our best performances. It was just a weird mix of inexperience and no communication between the recording engineer and the mixing engineer and us not really having the knowledge to direct the course the way that we probably should have."

 

 

But even though Harvey and Exhumed have re-recorded the album, the man understands the difficult balance between having a fun second chance and attempting to rewrite history. For him, it was just a cool opportunity to fix up something in his back catalogue that he's never been able to truly enjoy.

"I know a lot of people hate when bands do stuff like this, and I totally get it," he says. "For me, I enjoy listening to all of our albums except the first one, which I can't stand. So now I have something I can listen to that doesn't piss me off."


Harvey says that he learned something by going back and re-recording the album, and it's something that those of us on the outside have been aware of for years: Exhumed is progressing and growing as a band. That much was obvious back on the second or third full-length, but it wasn't as easy for Harvey, operating on the inside, to notice.

"The one thing I learned by re-recording all this stuff is that to me, in my mind, I don't think things are really all that different from when I was 16 and trying to just write Napalm Death, Repulsion, Carcass, Terrorizer type riffs and then do solos like Mike Amott and James Murphy and shit," he says. "Going back and re-recording some of those songs that were written in the mid-to-late-'90s makes me realize that the band actually has progressed quite a bit since then. In terms of songwriting and, I don't want to say technicality, it's not like we're technical... but it's certainly a lot more musical, and that was eye-opening for me, like, 'Huh. I guess we have moved forward a little bit. That was weird, I didn't realize it.'"

 

 

So onwards the band grinds, this slight detour looking back just a fun pit stop in a life dedicated to gore-grind and death metal of the highest quality. And while some purist fans may not appreciate the past being messed with, Harvey is ready for any criticisms that come his way.

"I completely expected it, and I get it," he says. "On some levels I feel the same way, but on other levels I do enjoy hearing bands' later takes on things. I loved [Sodom's] In The Sign Of Evil, and I also loved the Final Sign Of Evil re-recording. I like the re-recording that Exodus did of Bonded By Blood. I would never replace the original one, but it's an interesting add-on to the collection."

(Photos by Valerie Little John)



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