Hi, everyone. Drivethony Waytano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Exhumed album, Red Asphalt.

Here we have the newest and, I believe, 10th full-length album from this California death metal outfit who have been together as a band for well over 30 years at this point, which is no small feat, even considering the band's long rotating lineup of members. Still, despite that, they have managed to forge one of the more consistent discographies in extreme metal. Maybe not consistently amazing, but certainly consistent in terms of its direction and vision, because since their first act as a band Exhumed has very much known what they wanted to do. Their blood-splattered combination of death metal and grind-flavored drumming makes them a very influential band in the goregrind lane.

They have not just passionately stuck to that sound for years, but have also retroactively celebrated it when given the chance, like with their 2015 re-recording of their breakout 1998 record, Gore Metal, which is a project you could question the necessity of, but it just goes to show that Exumed is a band that clearly would not rather be doing anything else. That is to a point where for years, when it comes to the band's latest projects, there's just so little to report sometimes in terms of their sound and progression, even as they release projects that are heavily inspired by some of the gory titles in the horror section of an old-school VHS rental shop from back in the day.

But with that being said, this new album here did catch my attention a little bit and does also have a bit of a conceptual focus to it. Because I'm not just simply talking about this record because the chunky riffs and call and response vocals of its debut single actually were pretty catchy, at least for a death metal band. But also that track, "Unsafe At Any Speed", sets the tone for a pretty relatable concept stepped on this album, and that's cars. I'm sure most of us watching this video are drivers to some degree, have driven a little bit.

But despite cars being a regular part of our everyday lives, it's probably rare that we stop to think that we are regularly piloting 2,000 pound death machines that take thousands of lives every year. In fact, even the title itself, "Unsafe at Any Speed", is in reference to an old Ralph Nader book, which dives into a host of different things, including car manufacturers, cutting corners and doing everything they could legally to avoid putting any safety features into their cars.

So because of that, Red Asphalt isn't just like any other death metal album where the blood and the gore is just simply about the shock value of it. No, this record is also about something that is very normalized in our everyday lives but has extremely deadly potential. In fact, the lyrics on the title track read like the dramatic exposition you would hear from a super serious narrator in the midst of a driving instructional film. "Red asphalt, black nights, white lines, a wrong turn toward a screeching end."

Of course, the song "Shock Trauma" is also about the deadly effects of drinking and driving. A song about that is a given. So yeah, the band is really nailing the topical focus on this record and occasionally giving it the poeticism that maybe you wouldn't normally expect from a band with this gory veneer: "A mausoleum of steel and bone, death stacked upon the loam / A four-wheel coffin funeral home, my automotive catacomb." So yeah, there is a lot of thought behind how the band is drilling down into this concept.

But simultaneously, the performances and writing on the music side isn't always as interesting or thrilling. For example, there are numerous slower passages from "Shovelhead" and "Crawling From the Wreckage" that are frankly pretty tedious. And the band's sound at this point has just progressed and changed so little from their past several records, even down to how chunky, heavy, bassy, and compressed the overall mixes of the songs are, which leads to a predictability, a lack of novelty, that despite this being an extreme metal record, a death metal record, a grind-influenced record, just makes the overall vibe of the album feel very safe, which is the last thing you want your goregrind album to sound like, even if the final result is still pretty heavy and gruesome.

But yeah, while this album is loud for sure, there is definitely a lack of inter-band chemistry with these performances and a lack of genuinely impressive, memorable, and visceral guitar and drum work. Because of that, a lot of this album just speeds by like a bassy cacophonous blur. It's hard to feel like the band isn't going through the emotions on some level, a feeling that even the more anthemic guitar solos from many of these tracks can't fix.

So yeah, while there isn't an outright awful or terrible song in the tracklist on this record, for sure, I feel like Exumed only reached that destination due to due to a lack of risks and interesting detours along the way with this project, which is why I'm feeling like a strong 5 to a light 6 on it.

Anthony Fantano, Exhumed. Forever.