Re-Buried, “Flesh Mourning”
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July 17, 2025
The old-school death metal revival has been around for a lot longer than the movement it initially set out to revive. It’s been 25 years since members of Opeth and Katatonia started to fool around with the genre’s ancient texts, launching Bloodbath as perhaps the first band to explicitly bill itself as an homage to the early death metal era. When Bloodbath’s Breeding Death dropped in 2000, death metal was near its commercial nadir, and the idea of lovingly ripping off Entombed and Morbid Angel felt quaint and possibly ill-advised. Today, OSDM revivalism makes up a formidable corner of the metal marketplace. Onetime obscurities like Internal Bleeding and Demilich have become unwitting founders of whole cottage industries of worship acts. We’re living in an endless death metal revival, with hundreds of neo-practitioners for each originalist.
That’s the world that Re-Buried’s Flesh Mourning has been born screaming into—a world that’s already heard old Autopsy and Incantation riffs recombined six ways to Sunday. The only way to cut through that much noise is with sheer conviction, and fortunately, the Seattle band has that in spades. There isn’t much on the Greg Wilkinson-mixed Flesh Mourning that you haven’t heard a version of before, but Re-Buried play everything here with an admirable gusto that consistently pushes the material beyond OSDM’s mediocre median.
Alex Bytner (ex-Un) injects a little swing into his drum performance, a mercy in a genre that tends toward locked-to-a-grid perfection. Guitarists Eddie Bingaman and Paul Richards trade quirky, harmonics-laced riffs and barrel-chested doom progressions with equal aplomb, and Richards’s expressive (but never flashy) lead work adds the much-needed color to the band’s chiaroscuro canvas. Richards is also responsible for Flesh Mourning’s surprising Wurlitzer parts, which are a boon to the album’s creaking atmosphere; the end of “Jagged Psyche” sounds like a haunted carnival sinking into a swamp.
Most notable is the addition of vocalist Chris Pinto (also of FÓRN), who took over for the departing Matthew Chandler shortly after Chandler recorded his parts for 2023’s Repulsive Nature. Pinto understands the value of a death metal singer who can make truly disgusting sounds with his throat, and he sets out to make as many of them as possible over Flesh Mourning’s runtime. There’s a long one toward the end of death-doom crusher “Putridity in Existence” that I can only transcribe as “bleeeeaaaahhhhoooouuggh.” It sounds gross; it feels good.
One of Re-Buried’s boldest moves on Flesh Mourning is ending it with a gorgeous, atmospheric instrumental, “Cold Blood.” With little more than Wurlitzer, tinkling chimes, and aching, melodic guitar, the band adds a canny postscript to an album that, up until that point, was mostly concerned with bludgeoning the listener into submission. It works far better than it should, and it reveals Re-Buried as a band devoted to its sonic lineage but willing to prod at its boundaries.
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