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Interviews

Exhumed - Matt Harvey

09/08/13  ||  Pr0nogo

Exhumed is a bestial death metal outfit from the deadlands of California, and Matt Harvey’s been their commander-in-chief since the band’s grind-centered inception in 1990. With twenty-three years of experience fronting the group, he was the perfect man to talk to if you had any questions about him, his band, or his band’s latest release, “Necrocracy”, set to release on the sixth of August. Pr0nogo from Global Domination sat down and fucked around with him for a while. Read on, miscreant.

Global Domination: What’s up, Matt? Are you ready to confess the secrets of Exhumed?

Matt: Oh, I love talking about myself. Let’s do this.

We’re about to feel the onslaught that is “Necrocracy” on the sixth of August. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the album and what we can expect from Exhumed’s latest?

Well, it still tells like us, you won’t hear any flutes or trees or Vikings or ghosts or any of that silliness. It’s a little bit slower and heavier than the last album, with a bit more groove than before. I think the songs hopefully have more differences than the songs on the last one, because “All Guts” felt more same-y when it came to the songs. This one is a more song-oriented record in terms of hooks and arrangements and that kind of stuff. It’s still us, of course – we still have low vocals and high vocals and crazy riffs and whammy bars and solos and all that stuff that makes it ours.

I definitely think it’s our best album so far and it has way more of a band vibe than the last record, you know? It’s got more drum parts, more bass parts, just more of everybody playing as opposed to the last album which was more like, ‘hey check out this riff, there’s a blast beat, and now here’s another riff’. This one is more of what we wanted.

How do you feel about the transition from “All Guts, No Glory” to this album? Has the formula changed since 2011?

I think the main thing was with “All Guts” we had Danny [Walker] and Leon [del Müerte], and obviously they aren’t on this record. Most of putting this album together was an effort of the entire band. Another transition between the two was that for “All Guts”, we wrote via email for five or six months straight. With this one, we’d write stuff in between tour dates, and kind of flesh songs out over a longer period of time. I think because we put more time into the writing, the songs were able to stick out a bit more. Also, having a full touring lineup made a big difference – Mike and Rob came on board to start touring with us because Leon and Danny had other commitments and were no longer in the band. We had an actual rhythm section and shit this time and it added another dimension when it came to planning the album together.

What most people don’t notice is that we played around two hundred shows a year last year and the year before that, and we’ve already played at least half of that this year. Now there’s a group chemistry when we write and when we play. Once we put the songs together, as a band, there’s a lot more life in the songs being breathed in from the other guys. I know I write a lot of music, but it gets tiresome just hearing your own ideas all the time, and we all know each other musically and personally. We know our strengths and weaknesses, and it’s fun to write stuff and think ‘oh, Rob will be able to do a cool bass line here’ or ‘Mike can do something awesome with the drums at this part’, and the dynamics changed a lot because of that. I feel like we have a lot of momentum because we just play fuckin’ non-stop, and it’s healthy, you know? We just don’t stop playing, and that gives us the energy we need to put stuff like “Necrocracy” out.

I’ve been listening to the promo for quite a while now, and I’m really digging the relationship between the solos and the vocals, like in the middle of the “Dysmorphic”. How did you guys go about writing the music itself?

Usually, it just starts with riffs that I have lying around. Sometimes I have ideas that sit around for years, you know? When I have a cool riff and think, ‘this is really cool, but nothing I have goes with it’, I have to set it aside and leave it for another album. I kind of put three or four things together and we get in the jam room and make sure it all works. We add all of our clever and interesting bits to liven it up so it’s not just the same monotonous thing over and over again, but the one hindrance we have had over the years is that we’re on tour so much and we don’t live in the same cities, so we don’t rehearse very much.

A couple of the bonus tracks and the last track on the album were all written in the jam room, and it was kind of like, ‘hey, that was cool – do that again!’ and bam. There’s a song or two. It feels like a bunch of dudes putting it together in a sweaty garage room, at times. We won’t see one another for two weeks after the rehearsal, though, and then we tour again.

It sounds like the whole process is very eclectic, which seems to come out in the music.

That’s the one thing that I worry about, because in the interviews, I don’t want people to think it’s gonna be a fuckin’ boring record or that we’re insane and unintelligible. It’s fast and it’s intense and it’s heavy, but we’re at ten out of ten no matter what our BPM is. It’s not a contest to be the fastest, either, because it’s not 1987 anymore, so there is an actual point to the songs. We just want to create music that feels powerful to us, and that connects us with the fans and we just hope people like it as much as we do.

What part did you play in particular when it came to songwriting and structuring?

The basic riffs and structures and stuff are basically mine. I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone else because it is a team effort overall, but the skeleton of the album is mine originally. If those structures work, we go with them. If not, we fix them. Once we agree that they work, we come together and make them better and even more interesting than the original – fleshing it out, you know? And you start listening to the bands that you tour with every day and think ‘oh, that’s really cool. I like that bit there’. Listening to the Black Dahlia Murder, for example, they’re way more modern than anything we’re ever putting out, but they had good fuckin’ melodies and Ryan Knight is such a good fuckin’ guitar player. When I was listening to some of their passages, I was thinking, ‘it’s not much of a stretch for us to do something in that vein’.

Playing shows as Dekapitator, and seeing how they work, I came home from some of those gigs and had a Chuck Schuldiner/Autopsy riff in my head, haha. But when I’m writing the music, I like to add a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and luckily the guys liked most of the songs. The ones we thought were the best went on the album, and the ones we liked but weren’t as great overall were put on as the bonus tracks.

It sounds like you’ve drawn a lot of direct influences from a bunch of other bands.

Whatever it comes down to is gonna sound like Exhumed, but nobody creates in a void. We see some inspiration all over the place. Sometimes, you write something and say, ‘hey, this sucks ass – let’s do the opposite’. Sometimes, you see something and say, ‘hey, that’s pretty killer – let’s see what we could do with that’. Playing so many shows has given us confidence in expanding into totally unusual directions like that 8-10 time signature bit. I mean, just listening to “Necrocracy”, you’ve got melodic riffs and technical shit. It was cool just to have the confidence in our sound and in our band to say ‘hey, let’s try something new, in an area we haven’t done a lot of work in’.

Were you thinking of any specific band or album when you wrote the music?

I think each record is kind of a reaction to the one before it, you know? The last one was something along the lines of, ‘hey, what is it that Exhumed has done and done well? Let’s tap into that and make a statement record, like hey, this is our band’. But the last one was really good as far as that goes, so we didn’t feel the need to go back over that ground. With this one, we said, ‘let’s make it a little different than that one, a little slower maybe’, because pretty much all of “All Guts” was blisteringly fast. I mean you could name specific influences, all the oldschool shit – Carcass, Terrorizer, Slayer, Exodus, Napalm – it’s all kind of the same shit as all the other oldschool bands, but we found different ways to mix it up.

I’m never gonna play an Origin song – I couldn’t even if my life depended on it – so we’re never gonna be a modern band, but we’ll always be keeping to our sound. Each record kind of supports you, in a way and it allows you to bring that energy that allows you to stay inspired. We aren’t gonna pull a Morbid Angel thing where we put out a dance record, just like we aren’t gonna start singing about gnomes or whatever.

That ‘dance record’ comment is pretty spot-on.

I mean, let’s be honest, because I’m not trying to veil what I’m saying or being a shifty dude or whatever, if that’s what they believe in, it’s their band, not my band. It’s just not what I would do, that’s all I’m saying, haha.

What’s the band going to be doing in support of this beast, now that it’s nearing release?

Well, we’re going to Denmark at the end of August with Convulse and Entrails. It’ll be a real grindy, oldschool death metal festival, so it should be really fun. We’ve got a show with Carcass in L.A. at the end of September, and we’ll be touring with Dying Fetus and Devourment later on. We have stuff in the works to go to Russia and Ukraine, and Turkey and Greece maybe while we’re out there. We want to go to places we’ve never been before – specifically places like Russia and Belarus and – but we’ve barely tapped into Poland and shit like that. We’re looking for new places to play. I mean, we’ve been talking about South America for a long time now, and we had a bit of a missed opportunity last year, so we’re trying to put that together. This is our break time right now, haha, the only break time we’ll have for the next few weeks. We’ll go back to touring pretty shortly, but right now we’re just trying to relax and unwind a little bit.

Well, use that break time wisely.

Yeah, man, haha. I mean, I’ll be going to a family reunion later on this week, and in the meantime I’ll be sitting at my mom’s house, drinking beer, and realising that life’s not so tough, you know?

That’s the shit everyone wishes they could do for six weeks at a time. How do you guys write lyrics? Is it all on you, as the lead vocalist, or is it a group effort?

Well, the lyrics have been my area since the first album, really. This one obviously with the title and artwork and all is a bit more politically-focused. It’s still about blood and guts and shit but there’s more subtext and stuff going on than in some of our other releases. I try to wait until the song’s fully written, or I end up writing too many lyrics – which is why in some of our earliest recordings the vocals never shut the fuck up, haha. It kind of annoys me. But with this, usually I have a funny title or I jot stuff down when I get the ideas. I used to have a shitload of notebooks filled with stuff, but now I just put it in my phone – it’s a lot easier. But even the title of the album was like that, in a way.

I was reading a book by Christopher Hitchens, who was a really good atheist writer, called ‘God Is Not Great’, and there’s one part of the book that analyses the messed up shit that happens when religion runs countries. In one example, there was a king who was worshiped like a god, and he was the permanent ruler of that country even though he’s been dead for who knows how long, and he’s just got whoever running it for them while they wait for their king to return from the spirit world or whatever. And that’s when I thought of it as a Necrocracy. I thought it was a really cool title and I jotted it down and kept it around until it was needed. And it was pretty easy, looking into the fucked up political shit that’s happening these days, to pull that out and use it in this context. I made sure when writing the lyrics that they’re not liberal or conservative, they’re just kind of a condemnation of the system as a whole. No matter which side of the fence you’re on, most people can agree that they’re pretty pissed off, and that’s what I was kind of tapping into.

I was gonna save this question for later, but since you mentioned it already, how did you settle on the artwork for this album? There’s an obvious political subtext, like you said, but what themes were you guys playing around with within the art and the lyrics?

The original concept was that it was gonna have a little bit of a Cold War or World War II-era propaganda vibe. It’s a little more death metal-ish than what we originally had in mind, I think, but that’s probably a good thing, haha. The concept that you can see is that the dead are essentially being propped up the dead. The guy who drew it is Richard “French” [Sayer], a British guy, and he runs a skateboard hardware company.

We were originally trying to do the artwork in-house with Relapse, but we just kept going back and forth with the artists, and the more we tried to work on it, the further away it got from what we wanted. I mean, you either had some weird artsy kind of psychedelic thing, or you had a “Rust in Piece” cartoon thing, and we were just like, ‘fuck’, haha. But once French came into the picture, things just kind of clicked. I gave him the same concept that we gave Relapse, and he kind of got it immediately. I think he was more into it than the Relapse guys. Even the first concept sketch was way closer than anything we had achieved in like three months of going back and forth with the label. I ended up really fucking liking it, and when it was unveiled I received a bunch of texts from some of the guys I know, and they were like, ‘hey, nice cover man!’ It was a nice feeling once it was completed, that’s for sure.

In your own opinion, what really drove you to make this album? What was the main inspiration behind the making of “Necrocracy”? I remember when I asked Johan Söderberg from Amon Amarth the same question, he responded, ‘we kind of needed money so we just wrote another album’. Is it the same kind of deal for you guys?

To me, when you’re a band, there are a few things that you do. You write music, number one – you don’t just play other people’s shit, you record your own stuff. You put records out, and you play shows. Those are just the qualifying things you need to do to actually be a band, you know? I mean, an organism responds to stimuli and it does certain things, right? Well, bands play shows, go on tours, and write music. That’s just how shit is. I’m constantly writing songs, whether it’s Exhumed or Dekapitator or something else entirely – like for example I was listening to theme songs from ‘80s sitcoms and trying to write something like that – I’m just writing music constantly. It wasn’t a case of needing a new album, it was a case of, ‘I’ve written all this shit already over the years, so when are we gonna record this shit?’ It was trying to fit the rehearsal and recording into the tour schedule.

I actually don’t think Relapse was ready for us to be as ready as we were for recording, because there were all sorts of delays, and we recorded this thing in September or October. We’re on our own schedule, haha, and we just play all the fuckin’ time, and because of that we have so much momentum. Once you’re going and you’re on a good roll, why stop? That’s just we do.

I hear that labels mess things up pretty frequently when it comes to getting shit mixed at a reasonable time.

It’s not just the label, but yeah. The studio we had it mixed in, the Machine Shop, is actually a really high-profile studio and we were pretty excited that they were doing it. I mean, stuff like Lamb of God is mixed there on a regular basis. So obviously, when it came down to the dude who’s doing the mixing, it’s Exhumed – it’s not his number one priority and it’s not what he usually does. But the biggest piece of bad luck was that the super storm hit right after we had finished recording. And this is a big studio with a lot of people and a lot of projects, all demanding that their shit gets done, and the studio itself was closed for several days because of the storm. So naturally when it re-opened, it had to play catch-up like anything else, and what was the thing that got pushed back? Obviously not Lamb of God, haha, it was us. And I’m not knocking the studio or the label because that’s just how things are in that business. It was just a case of shit ending up taking a couple months longer they were supposed to, that’s all. Yeah, it’s unfortunate, but you can’t control the weather.

If we could, I imagine Florida would be globalised. But when you were in the studio, recording the album, what allowed you to maintain that energy and passion for the music – the same stuff you talked about when you were writing the record?

Actually, the main thing that was really cool about this album was that we were all there for almost the entirety of the process. We recorded the drums in Orange County, and then we went to Phoenix to record everything else, and we had a hotel room and actually lived together day in and day out during the recording. With the last record, during recording, it was more, ‘you do your part, I’ll do my part, and when you’re doing your part I’ll go to the bathroom or something’. We weren’t hovering over each other this time around, but we were all there, all the time, to be part of the process. I think that just by being present really helped. Having Rob and Bud and Mike around to let us play off of each other is something we haven’t really done before, and we actually had more time to make this album than we had ever had previously.

How do you guys work inside the studio? Is it a lengthy procedure, or does it just kind of coalesce quickly and smoothly?

It went really fast just because we’re so used to playing together, you know? We really only rehearse for the record for little over two weeks, or maybe a little under. It’s been so long since we’ve recorded that it’s hard for me to remember, haha. We didn’t rehearse that much, so we were dependent on the fact that we play day in and day out and that we have the confidence to say, ‘hey, I don’t know how this drum fill is gonna go, but it’s gonna be kinda like this and we’ll finalize it later and take it from there’. We had five days to do the drums and that’s two days more than we ever have had in the past. Two days is a big amount of breathing room even though it doesn’t sound like it is, because you’re writing and fine-tuning drum fills for an entire full-length album. And even after that, we had fourteen days to record the rest, and that’s by far the longest we’ve spent in the studio.

Even still, that’s still only nineteen days plus two weeks of rehearsal, and as a result the album was kind of something we all put together in about a month. Sure, we wrote stuff over a long period of time, but the major legwork and the polish was all in that short period of time. Once we dug into it, it was really fuckin’ fast. It’s been weird too because, like I said, it’s been so long since that recording process. I’m just now getting hit with interviews, and we’ve been away from that whole process for so long that I had to start listening to record again, haha. We had never really come back to that procedure since its completion, because the record’s not out yet.

How do you go about warming up for gigs and performances?

It just depends on how long we’ve been on tour, I think, and how disciplined we are. The one thing we did in Europe – which I really appreciated – was change the first song on our setlist to one of our easiest songs ever. I mean, I could play that song without warming up at all, even if it was a ‘wake up, brush your teeth, now play this song’. I could do it pretty easily, so it was a big help because it let us get used to the venue and the crowd. It varies from member to member, though. For example, Mike warms up quite a bit – he usually plays for at least a half hour before we play on the stage. Doug will play a lot because he just loves playing guitar. Sometimes we’ll be really on the ball we’ll hang out and do push-ups and shit, but a lot of other times we just sit around, drink beer, and talk about who the best fuckin’ chick we’ve seen in the building so far is.

I think that at first, it’s really important to warm up, but after that it’s like, ‘aw, fuck it’. It just becomes less necessary because your muscle memory really takes over. Sometimes, my mind goes blank and I find that my hand is still playing the guitar without me even thinking about it, and I’m like, ‘I’m glad my muscles are smarter than my brain, because I forget how this riff goes!’ Other times it gets really hot on stage and if I’m doing a really long scream, I’ll get a little lightheaded. But I’ll look down afterwards and see that, well, my hands are still moving, so shit’s still working, haha.

Yeah, sounds like it gets as hectic during the show as it does during the scheduling. Most people in the metal scene have to work day jobs on top of the touring and performing. How has that affected your lives as musicians?

That’s a big reason we do try and play all the time, because I don’t want to work at a record store again. That job fuckin’ sucks. We really just try to stay as busy as possible, and luckily, we have an awesome booking agent, haha. We’ve got another one in Europe now who’s filling dates like crazy, and it’s great because it allows eke out a living, just barely – and then we starve until the next tour, haha.

“You hear that, boys? We’re playing a show in Europe! We get to eat this week!”

It’s not quite that bad, but yeah, haha. It reminds me of Kiss who were on tour nonstop and putting out a record every year and a half, and I’m like, ‘fuck, why don’t bands do that anymore?’ Sitting around for six months having deep thoughts doesn’t really help rock and roll, you know? We just try to keep playing music and going on tours and making music, and that’s really at the heart of rock and roll or metal or whatever.

Have you seen any of the reviews or heard any feedback from the fans, now that you’re having your break?

I’ve seen a couple things here and there, but I don’t get too hung up on reading it. I am curious, but at the same time I try not to worry about it too much. People post stuff, and I’ll read it sometimes, and so far it seems pretty positive, which is really cool. But we just try to make songs that we like, and when we’re making the music and writing a song, it’s kind of like, ‘how does it go next?’ Not, ‘where am I gonna take this’, or anything. We just allow shit to happen and it flows, like the Force or something, you know?

Use the Force, Matt.

Hell yeah, man.

What do you think “Necrocracy” says about the future of Exhumed as a whole? Sure, there aren’t any elves or trees, but do you think you’re taking the band in a new direction with this album, or is the purpose still the same?

It’s so weird, because once the record is done, it’s kind of hard to think, ‘what’s the next step?’ We set out to do something, and now it’s completed, and you have this feeling of being done. And we’re just getting to the part where the songs are taking on a life of their own, you know, when we’re playing it live and stuff. As far as the future of the band, it’s still going, and we’re never gonna sing about elves and trees and ghosts and goblins, and it’s always gonna have blast beats and crazy riffs, and it’s gonna be nasty and gross and grindy and death-y, and we’ll see what goes with the record, I guess.

We’re just recovering from the tour cycle of the last record, and trying to gear up for the tour cycle of this record, haha, and it’s a little early to think about the next thing. We try to be a working band and making money and shit is definitely a part of that, but we’re writing for the music. We never sit around in the jam room and think, ‘hey this riff will get us a slot at Wacken’. We think, ‘it’s a good song? Good, done, on to the next one’. I mean, I see all these people and all these bands working for exposure and coverage. That’s all well and good, but that’s not a reason to make music, or to do anything. Anything creative is about finding your own voice and your own take on something, and developing that to be the best that it can be. The band is what it is because we did that with our music and the way we make our music, and that part of Exhumed is definitely not going to change.

That’s really refreshing to hear, believe it or not, because I think a lot of bands – especially younger ones or unsigned ones – feel much more conscious of their funds and their exposure and their Facebook likes.

You know, I think they’ve grown up in a different time, and the information with social networking and YouTube and shit reveals that people actually give a shit about what people are saying about them, and people desperately want attention. I was brought up the opposite way, you know, like, if it’s the right thing to do, you do it. When we started Exhumed, everyone else was trying to be the next big popular band or whatever, and they just thought our band sucked shit. Metal in general is about being in opposition to what’s nice and what’s friendly and what’s accepted as normal. When I hear someone who’s in a band talking nonstop about the relationship with the press and this guy and that guy, I’m just like, ‘shut up, man’. If you want to do that, make pop music. That’s where you get popular. But if you want to express something dark and angry, and you want to make music for the purpose of making the fuckin’ music, then play metal.

Some of the really good bands in metal are the most popular in the genre for no reason other than the fact that they’re really fuckin’ good, you know? But if it’s calculated self-promoting, like the kids on stage saying, ‘check out our Internet page’, when I see that I just want to throw up. If people like your band, they’re gonna find you, wherever your fuckin’ page is. Look inside yourself and try to come up with something decent, and people will support you for making good music that appeals to them. You don’t need to shove your Internet page onto your band sticker and plaster them all around the toilet, man.

I have seen so many fucking stickers and post-it notes when I take a shit at a concert, and it’s pretty ridiculous. It seems that they’d rather invest in marketing their band than making their band worth listening to.

Yep, there you go. And you know, especially once you have a record deal. it’s not my job to tell you where my fuckin’ Internet page is. The label is more financially invested in it than I am, to be honest. When people come to the shows, I’m thinking, ‘that’s good enough for me, I hope they buy some shirts’, haha. And I think that’s a good thing, you know? There should be some separation of passion for the music and money for the music. It’s kind of like when people talk about Jay-Z like he’s the pinnacle of music and business. He’s not, he’s a good businessman, and he’s sold his music really well, but that doesn’t mean his music is any good.

Yeah, because it’s not how good your product is, it’s how well you sell it.

Right, and that just seems stupid to me. That’s the opposite of any kind of artistic expression, not that we’re making fuckin’ Greek paintings over here – it’s just heavy metal, haha – but at the same time as long as it’s genuine, it doesn’t need to be sold. It just needs to be good.

I appreciate you being as candid and animated as you’ve been, man. Like you said, you’re not trying to be a shifty figure or anything. I like that, and I wish more interviews went like this.

I’m too old to fuckin’ care about that, man. I’m thirty-seven. We’re not trying to be spooky characters, we’re just being real.

Thanks for talking with us, Matt. You got any last words for the fans, the staff, my mom, and whoever else might be reading?

Haha, tell your mom I’m sorry about the stain on the carpet. She can bill me for the cleaning. No but seriously, thanks for the interview and the support, and we really appreciate it when people come out to the shows. Hopefully you guys will pick up the record and have a blast, because we sure enjoyed making it.

I’m sure they’ll enjoy it as much as I have. Have a good one, man.
Cheers.

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Interviews