Artist - Leng Tch’e
Album - The Process of Elimination
Label - Relapse
Reviewer - Chris Pacifico
When the nation of Belgium comes to mind, I think of waffles, chocolate, and citrus flavored beer. What about a new style of gridcore? The answer is now yes. Being the one thing from Belgium that kicks more ass than Jean Claude Van Dam, Leng Tch’e has avoided the sophomore slump on their second album which shows that the quartet has clearly evolved in their abilities to make quality metal music. Taking their band name from a term used to describe an ancient Chinese torture method in which the victim is given copious amounts of opium as he is slowly sliced into small pieces; Leng Tch’e proudly describes their musical style as “razor grind”. Even though their music goes beyond the notion of being pigeonholed, their mannerisms consist of the grindcore backbone similar to that of Napalm Death and take it to a whole new abrasive level that is a melting pot of metal sub-genres all while being played at the furious whims of the dual guitar onslaught from Geert Devenster and Jan Hallaert, fronted by the grating voice of lead singer Boris Cornelissen on an album with 24 songs (most under two minutes) that clocks in at 33 minutes.
“The Fist of the Leng Tch’e” starts off the album with the tree shredder beats of drummer Sven De Caluwe as the gruesome tactility in “Don’t Touch My Spandex” will be sure to make your skin crawl. All four members exhibit sharp vocal precision on “Remote Control”, but the only downside is that it is over in 30 seconds. Ghoulish punk fury is abound with tracks like “Ingest/Dissent” and the ruckus inducing “Schematic” glides by with a gritty stride as Nicolas Malfeyt makes his bass lines grumble like the stomach of a hungry beast.
The Process of Elimination touches ground at times with a tone that can lean more into the tundra of the stoner metal domain. The grimy sludge patterns of Pantera and White Zombie are resonated to a degree on “Overkill Bill” as “Another Hit Single” will be sure to wreak havoc on your nerves with its tapered guitar licks. The sped-up colossal riffs such as those heard last year by Probot, the doom-metal experiment orchestrated by Dave Grohl, come crashing in on “Glamourgirl Concubine”. Other styles are merged with grind at times such as the biker-metal musings of Zeke on “Motorgrinding”, early 90’s NYC hardcore with “Icon Resize”, the thrash metal hybrid “Clarity Denied”, to all out fist pumping anthems like “Scene Scenery” . They even break out the organ that adds some eerie chimes to “P.I.M.P.”
If you can manage to actually understand some of the lyrics, you will actually see that some of Leng Tch’es music has a message that they try to convey in some of their songs. Corporate Americas remorseless mass marketing of junk food is a topic that is brought to the table on “Fat Camp” with lyrics like “Come on pass the mayonnaise/Eat another burger/I’ll like you even more/Uncle Sam told you to eat that shit/Fat camp, come on here my bourgeois tease bitch”. Leng Tch’e also chides President Bush’s main base of narrow minded Evangelicals from the southern United States on “Patriotic Pleasure” as Cornelissen tears them a new one with verses such as “Hide behind you fuckin flag/country-ass hillbilly bastards”
In the past four years or so, many metal bands have tried to act tough or extreme for shock value while artists such as Dimmu Borgir and Mushroomhead have made themselves look ridiculous by dressing up in cheesy garb ever since Slipknot stepped onto the playing field. It’s gotten to the point where it has morphed into a straightforward cliché. That would help explain the 21st century prog/art movement of bands such as Mastodon, Mars Volta, Isis, etc. However, the one thing that separates Leng Tch’e from all of the modern death metal prima donnas is the fact that the brutality in their sound is not gratuitous like their other European counterparts, most notably the Finnish and the Norwegian ones. Please don’t get the impression that I am Euro-bashing because it must be dually noted that there is no short supply of pretentious American bred bands as well. That being said, The Process of Elimination is an apt template for metal heads who want to expand their horizon without coming off like a fool.
