What’s the point in resurrecting your band if the resulting reunion album is going to be a flaccid state of affairs? To make a few more dollars so you can better pay for your kids’ school clothes and cover your rent/mortgage? Of course, and that’s a damn fine reason.
Alright, so, to REPHRASE the question, what’s the point in fans paying attention to a reunion album if it’s just a weak rehash of a band’s glory days? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one. Decidedly non-metal band The Pixies have it right: an extended reunion tour with absolutely no new material, keeping whatever legacy they already had mostly intact (Judas Priest have it backward: no more touring but more new music no one will care about). Because for every new Suffocation album, albums that stand up to their iconic predecessors, there’s a dozen similar to new Sepultura records, albums that fully exhibit the leathery skin, newly-formed jowls, formidable beer guts, gray hair, and phlegmy wheezing of the band at the helm (or whatever’s left of the band in Sepultura’s case).
So for Autopsy to return in 2011, one would hope that they wouldn’t be doing it for the money, but instead because the band have more to say. Having watched the genre they helped refine go from lanky, unwashed social outcasts to kids in cargo shorts, flat brim caps, and 8-string guitars (as well as socially awkward weirdos indulging in guitar wankery on YouTube), a new Autopsy album better mean something. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Macabre Eternal, the band’s first album since their rightfully-maligned swansong Shitfun, means quite a bit. It’s not a winded Autopsy stumbling through slightly-rearranged classics; this is new Autopsy in earnest, familiar-yet-uncharted. It’s also top-fucking-notch death metal, grimy in all the right places and nimble in the others. It goes toe-to-toe with most other death metal kicking around right now, and there’d be no purpose to a new Autopsy album otherwise.
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