REVIEW: EXHUMED 'ALL GUTS, NO GLORY' (RELAPSE)

Ah, at long last (made slightly longer by the time spent listening to this album and not reviewing it), the eagerly awaited return from the best 'Carcass clone' that don't actually sound that much like Carcass.

While Bay Area gore metallers Exhumed once had more than a little reek of putrefaction about their person (olol), they've since become a tightly honed warhead of Floridian death metal guitar heroics (there's a whiff of Deicide's 'Dead By Dawn' on 'Death Knell'), tech death drumming fury courtesy of the extremely prolific Danny Walker, and good old fashioned grindcore call and response that may as well be Extreme Noise Terror if they'd opted to drench themselves in chicken innards, rather than refuse to eat them. And yeah, there's a bit of 'Heartwork' in the bell-tolling guitar tone, but that's a mere stitch compared to the rusted braces and fat ugly sutures holding the component chunks of Necrophagia, Obituary, Dismember and Death to this slice of non-specifically old school bludgeon. Reminiscent of no one band or era, but brilliantly evocative of every slice of pose-striking ferocity to have ever hidden behind an impenetrable logo.

'All Guts, No Glory' will never be mistaken for the next step in the evolution of death metal, or its next piece of retrograde trendsetting to capture the limited imaginations of the 'underground', but if there's ever cause to stick one piece of extreme metal in a time capsule, or escape pod, to keep the cultural memory of the human race alive after some cataclysm, Exhumed do a pretty good job of summing up the absolute best of classic and contemporary savagery, like the eerie, muscular superman of Mary Shelly's 'Frankenstein', before Hollywood gave him an eight inch forehead and a cadaverous shuffle.