Interview with Matt Harvey of Exhumed

Lock the mausoleum doors and chain up the cemetery gates. Long-standing gore metal maniacs, EXHUMED re-emerge with their disgusting new album Death Revenge.

The band’s sixth full-length sees them tread into ambitious new territory with their first concept album: a musical melodrama in thirteen parts based on shocking true events. Death Revenge takes place in the late 1820s in Edinburgh, Scotland and tells the macabre tale of a series of brutal murders where the victims’ cadavers were sold to anatomists, amid a grisly underground trade of grave-robbery. Recorded with producer Jarrett Pritchard (Goatwhore, Gruesome), Death Revenge takes the band’s signature gore-drenched, death metal mayhem to theatrical and ghastly new depths. Cover illustration is by Orion Landau with interior illustrations by Lucas Ruggieri.

Frontman Matt Harvey comments: “We’re very excited to see this record come out. It’s been a long time since we’ve fucked up your stereos! I think this record has a darker vibe than the last two, with a pretty gnarly tale of grave-robbery, dissection, murder, and all sorts of general skullduggery. We dig it and we hope you filthy animals will too.”

On Carcass comparisons…..

Yeah, I mean you know, definitely Carcass is one of our influences, but you know I think people, because we have two vocalists and because we use words with more than two syllables, I think people have been really eager, rhroughout our careers to say you guys really sound like Carcass and it didn’t really bother me that much until Carcass got back together and I was like oh God this is really getting annoying. So I’m happy to hear that, you’re not just, our new record sounds just like Carcass, not really what I want to hear. But I mean hey like you said it’s all. It all depends on the listeners.

On early musical upbringing….

You know first hearing like all their music Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix and Stanley Brown and Robin Trower and Cream. My Dad was a huge Cream fan. And then my my uncle was a jazz fusion musician and so you know I remember hearing you know stuff like Chick Corea or Mahavishnu Orchestra when I was a kid and my grandmother also was a piano teacher. So I you know it seemed like you could it was there was a thing that you could do you could pick up an instrument and get fairly proficient at it you know because I could go to my grandma’s house and her playing you know whatever Christmas carols or or you know little box bits and stuff like that. So then I think when I was about 10 or 11 I started listening to the music just outside of what my family was exposing me to and I was really into like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys the L cool J that I was kind of like my first foray outside of my parents music.

On selling tickets to play Bay Area clubs in the beginnin …

Oh yeah of course. I mean it’s really funny. There’s a Facebook page about the Stone, the Omni and One Step Beyond and I just became a member of it or whatever going on and I was going through and I was like looking . Yup there’s my phone number for cheap tickets right there. OK., scroll down. There’s another flyer with my phone number. Yes I mean it was a trip because you know we kind of read like you got sucked into that world really quickly. You know we’ve done a couple of shows and I think we played Marsugi’s in San Jose. And then we were doing a show at the Omni on like a Thursday night you know how they would always have those weekday like local band shows and you know 40 people would show up to a 800 capacity room and it’s very depressing. But basically one of the bands I think was Aggro that pissed off the staff there and they were supposed to be opening for Death. I think this would have been the very beginning of 92. I guess it would have been on a Human tour. And so they said you guys are off the show. They just turn to us like you guys want to play with Death in January or whatever. Yeah of course. And so then that Death tour ended up being canceled and a bad first of all that I will put you on with the Autopsy and then with Cannibal Corpse And this is you know January and February 92 and so we’re like this is even better. Like holy shit. And you know because you were such sort of like clean cut kids we always would show up on time and we would always have the money.

You know like we are we were very reliable and so. And also because we were young and nerdy we couldn’t have gotten in that much trouble you know I mean like we were backstage causing trouble we weren’t trying to sneak beers we were doing anything shady. We were just there to you know play death metal. So they liked us you know the most we asked for was like with free soda. And you know just right right and we were just you know I was like 16 or 17. So I’m just getting coke now. And so we just they kind of kept offering us more and more shows. You know it was like us and Immortal Fate and something until 93 when the club started to close down. I mean we really didn’t need to play anywhere else.

EXHUMED w/ The Black Dahlia Murder, Suffocation, Decrepit Birth, Necrot, Wormwitch:
11/01/2017 Studio Seven – Seattle, WA w/ Exhumed
11/02/2017 HIFI Music Hall – Eugene, OR w/ Exhumed
11/03/2017 Vinyl at Hard Rock – Lake Tahoe, NV w/ Exhumed
11/04/2017 Phoenix Theater – Petaluma, CA w/ Exhumed #
11/05/2017 KnotFest – San Bernardino, CA w/ Exhumed # **
11/06/2017 Club Red – Mesa, AZ w/ Exhumed
# = No Suffocation
* = No Necrot, Wormwitch