Review of the Album "Exit Wounds" by Swedish Thrash Metal Band The Haunted

The Haunted’s 2014 album called Exit Wounds has an instrumental song, growls that sound like death metal vocals, and some melody so this is not a 100% one-dimensional album.

The album has a lot of anger in it and the song Cutting Teeth in terms of the riffing is similar to the song Bury Your Dead of the band’s second studio release. No it is not a carbon copy of that song but this song Cutting Teeth has vocals that would make Finland’s Scalping Screen proud. 317 is a short instrumental that starts out with the sound of what can only be described as the beating of a heart and then the song speeds up into a usual The Haunted kind of riff. Listening to the song further, the very start of it sounds like the song That Was Just Your Life by Metallica. The album is actually one of those albums that lyrically rebels at human nature for being so harsh, so greedy, and manipulative. However, it terms of overall musical heaviness and brutality, Exit Wounds isn’t quite as heavy as Scalping Screen’s music but this is still a VERY heavy dose of thrash and death metal.

The short and fast song called My Enemy has a sort of Florida death metal influence in it such as the band Cannibal Corpse. The song This War is a song that tells us how the world really is as the powerful people take advantage of those people that are weak. The people that play this game make it harder for the average person to “win” in life as the cards seem to be stacked against those of us that don’t really have lots of wealth and power. My Salvation is a decent song about a person that is suffering so much that he wishes he could have ended “it” or his life sooner. He wonders why he is still alive. The biggest con with the album Exit Wounds is that the lyrical content has not much variety in it as the themes of the songs are about chaos, violence, war, and human suffering. Another con for the album is the cheesy, profane lyrics of the song Trend Killer. This album is clearly below the quality of the album called The Dead Eye but one thing is clear: the melody is still present along with the rage and anger in the music. Eye of the Storm has a clear and definite Testament influence in the melody lines.

I will agree with writer Al Kikuras on Angry Metal Guy that the album “Exit Wounds is modern thrash with nothing retro or “nu” about it,” (Kikuras, 2014). However, his rating of 4.5 out of 5.0 for this album is too high of a rating to give this album. Marco Aro does sound like a modern day version of Chuck Billy (since Chuck switched to heavy harsher growls in 1994). Marco’s voice has that guttural feel that is more sinister for a lack of a better word instead of that low, guttural growl that is heard in some death metal bands.

The term nu metal started to come into the popular culture when System of a Down came onto the heavy metal scene in the 1990’s. The Haunted are basically a hybrid mix of thrash metal that has fast grooves and the vocals with Marco Aro are so harsh that they almost sound like a modern death metal style. The Infiltrator is a song that sounds like early 1980’s death metal similar to what Chuck Schuldiner wrote. The best songs in the album Exit Wounds are Cutting Teeth, Eye of the Storm, Time (Will Not Heal), All I Have, and Ghost in the Machine. The other songs are decent but the album is just lacking the songwriting of the band up until 2006.

Final score as of this first writing: 80 out of 100 points for a B grade.

Reference

Kikuras, A. (2014, August 28). The Haunted-Exit Wounds Review.