Rating: 6.6

Country: USA

Release Date: 2004

Track list:
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

Band Website: Exhumed

Exhumed - Anatomy Is Destiny

Matt Harvey - Guitar, Vocals
Mike Beams - Guitar, Vocals
Bud Burke - Bass, Vocals
Col Jones - Drums

Exhumed, although certainly better than the vast majority of their peers among death metal bands that have broken out within the past 6-7 years, presents a textbook case of one of the biggest problems that currently plague this genre.

On ‘Anatomy Is Destiny', their third full-length, the Bay Area goremongers continue along the same path as they did on the prior albums, ‘Slaughtercult' [2000] and ‘Gore Metal' [1998]. The biggest difference this time around is that the band's sound has been cleaned up considerably; the playing on ‘Anatomy Is Destiny' is substantially tighter than on any of their prior recordings, and the production job [this time done by famed rock/metal soundboard guru Neil Kernon, who has also worked with the likes of Nevermore , Cannibal Corpse, Skinless, Akercocke, Macabre, Usurper, Queensryche, Peter Gabriel, Hall & Oates and {you ready for this?} Michael Bolton] is much clearer and crisper than before. To be perfectly fair, ‘Anatomy Is Destiny' does prove to be slightly more melodically inclined and less exhibitive of the crossover influence [Cryptic Slaughter, D.R.I., etc.] that was prominent on the earlier Exhumed recordings, but with regard to the big picture, these differences are fairly neglible. The basic style is still a combination of simple, but effective Stockholm-style death metal riffs played over a thrash backbeat, with frequent blasting and Carcass-esque multi-pitched vocals and tongue-in-cheek gore lyrics.

One could say, looking at the album length [45+ minutes] as well as individual song lengths when compared to the band's earlier material that the tracks on ‘Anatomy Is Destiny', that the new material is more 'well-developed' and 'mature' than the old. But while this may well hold true in some respects [it certainly takes more effort to write a 4-minute song with 8-9 different riffs than it does a 2½-minute song with 4-5 riffs], the band's writing has not really advanced enough to warrant longer songs, or to make them more interesting than the shorter, sloppier, more blast-happy songs on ‘Gore Metal' and ‘Slaughtercult'. The reason is that Exhumed still do not do nearly enough to vary their material over the span of a full album. They may have incorporated more melody and smoothed out some of their goregrind edges, but with all of the songs sharing the same very limited set of chords, and being played at virtually identical tempos, the greater length of this album really ends up hurting it in the long run. To put it bluntly, Exhumed are pretty good song writers, but very poor album writers. It's difficult to sit through any album which features songs that all sound this much alike, no matter how solid they are individually - it just becomes a drag after 4 or 5 tracks. This is by no means a problem that's unique to Exhumed, since a vast, vast majority of death metal albums being released nowadays suffer from the same lack of variety - and it really goes all the way back to the genre's beginnings. But the fact that so many of their contemporaries adopt a similarly one-dimensional approach to their album writing doesn't absolve Exhumed from guilt. They're not part of the solution, which means they're part of the problem.

August 29th, 2005