Album Review

Leng Tch’e

Hypomanic

The newest offering from Belgian death grindsters Leng Tch’e is a heaping dose of loud aggressive death metal with varying hints of grind and hardcore. The album starts off with Wirehead Imbeciles, a track that begins with a typical fade in intro that segues into some fast death metal but quickly turns into a basically hardcore chorus. The guitars slow down to a metalcore chug with breakdown worthy double bass kicks. It really did not start off well with me. Track number two, A.Men, starts to get closer to the grind that I had been looking for but about halfway through the less than 2 minute long song the same type of core-ish breakdown appears that eventually leads into more death stylings. Track number three continues in the same fashion but breaks it up in the middle with a riff that seems like it would fit better on a thrash album. It is a great sounding riff that leads into some great death/grind that makes the song much better than the previous two tracks.

What I have noticed with the first few songs is that the band seems to try to be everything to everyone without fully honing their skills in any one genre. I, for one, love the sub-genre melting pot that is metal these days. Blackened thrash, blackened death, folk/black; there are any number of ways to integrate different sub-genres into a band’s sound and make it sound amazing. And one of the most important parts of mixing genres is making the normally different sounds complement each other and weave seamlessly together. What Leng Tch’e have done here is bring together death, grind, and hardcore and just put several different passages into each song. Bringing together these different genres and making it sound great is possible, Misery Index is a great example of a band that is able to accomplish this. What didn’t work for me was that each sound was separate and almost made each song have different tracks within themselves. Death then grind then hardcore then death, next track. This carries on for the entire album. Not even having Barney Greenway contribute guest vocals can make this a must have album. All in all I can call this a decent but not great album.