It's been a long haul since Gore Metal, but in a lot of ways it kind of hasn't. Released 15 years ago to immediate success, that seminal album was instrumental in reviving the stripped down, raw brutality of first wave death metal… a genre that, by the late 90s, had slowed down substantially under the influence of the new melodic bands (In Flames, At the Gates) as well as the more groove-oriented approach of Entombed.
Exhumed's Matt Harvey (the sole constant member) has often cited complete disinterest in the changing aesthetic of the bands that influenced him as one of his early motivations:
The differences between [Entombed’s] “Left Hand Path” and “Wolverine Blues” or [Carcass’s] “Reek of Putrefaction” and “Swansong” are both pretty big. It seemed like nobody was playing the kind of death metal that I was into. I stopped being a current death metal fan in 1993, because it just didn’t sound like what I liked. I wanted more stuff like Impetigo, Cadaver, those types of bands… So, we just played old-fashioned death metal.
Apparently he had somewhat of a change of heart along the way, with later albums like Anatomy Is Destiny exhibiting a more methodical, mid-paced attack with non-trivial amounts of melodic lines laced throughout (though not necessarily in the more overt, NWOBHM-influenced twin lead style).
Always a proponent of paying homage to his influences since the early 7" days, Harvey recorded an album of covers (Garbage Daze Re-Regurgitated) in 2005 and called it a day on the Exhumed brand. After a half decade of playing with bands like Dekapitator and Gravehill, Harvey had a rethink over resting the Exhumed legacy on a collection of other people's songs and decided to reform the band with the goal toward giving it a proper send off.
Two albums deep into Exhumed mach 2 and the reunion has stuck. 2011's All Guts, No Glory saw Harvey continuing where Anatomy Is Destiny left off rather than getting back to his Gore Metal roots, and Necrocracy is in keeping with that trend. If anything, songs like "Dysmorphic" and "(So Passes) The Glory of Death" are more influenced than ever by the clean, melodic lines of Swansong, a record Harvey once professed to have little regard for.
No matter, really. Heavy metal is pretty much an embarrassment of riches these days, with any style that's ever existed within the genre experiencing a revival by dozens of talented bands all over the world, so it hardly seems like any betrayal if Matt Harvey refuses to give us Gore Metal Vol. 2. That's already being taken care of elsewhere.
What is important is that Exhumed have accomplished what they set out to do here, namely give the world a thoughtful, well-crafted death metal album in a mid-90s vein, where melodic leads had begun to creep in but the genre hadn't gone full Maiden yet. The fact that it took Harvey 15 years to realize that the style he was rebelling against at the time actually had substantial validity in the first place need not be a blemish on his contemporary aspirations.
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