Artist: Mortuary Ghoul
Country: USA
Label: Iron Fortress Records
Formats: LP / Cassette Tape / CD
Year: 2025
While ‘Wear Your Face: Corpse Exhumation Redux’ is somehow marketed as a new Mortuary Ghoul album, it’s not. The title already suggests that it is a retake of something, and that is exactly what this is. It is a revamped version of the band’s first EP ‘Corpse Exhumation’. With a few more tracks, stretching its playing time to just 30 minutes, this now indeed could pass as a full-length album.
The original EP, released in 2022, was already issued in various format on four different labels, but apparently Matt Ghoul, the only person behind this band, wasn’t entirely satisfied with how it all turned out. Or, in hindsight, thought things could have been better. Most of the times I am extremely sceptical when musicians are re-mastering or even completely re-recording some of their early material. But, frankly, while nothing bad at all, nothing Mortuary Ghoul ever did can remotely be regarded as “classics”. So, there’s not much lost when it gets a little tampered with.
Another thing: the entirety of Mortuary Ghoul’s sounds exactly the same anyway. That means that only the sound can be updated and upgraded a bit. And that seems what’s been done here. As far as I understood, the tracks are not re-recorded, but got remastered by Wes Mousseau.
Opposed to the original version, the tracks indeed sound a bit heavier and meatier, offering a more of an experience that’s on par with the project’s latest recordings. The same can be said about the three new tracks that elevates this particular release to full-length status. Primarily slow and pounding gory Death Metal in the right Mortician tradition, including the fast bursts of violence and the mandatory movie samples. The latter have an additional value here as these songs are heavily inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and Deranged – hence the updated cover art as well.
