When Belgium’s Leng Tch’e hit the scene in 2002 with their Death By A Thousand Cuts debut I was an instant fan. Their simple, heavy, catchy and humorous approach to goregrind easily helped them stand out from the crowd and quickly became a favourite of mine.

Their 2003 Willowtip effort, Manmade Predator, was a step up musically, but the vocals were a major step down from the debut and, to me at least, made the album a lot less entertaining than the debut.

Earlier this year, after even more issues with vocalist Isaac during the recording of their latest full length effort, The Process Of Elimination, Leng Tch’e decided it was time for a change and quickly replaced Isaac with good friend Boris of Holland’s Suppository. Boris had basically a week or two to learn all of the songs before having to enter the studio and lay down the vocal tracks for the music that had already been recorded. I’d heard some of the early studio work with Isaac and even I agreed he had to go, but I was sceptical about the addition of Boris as I wasn’t overly impressed with the vocals he’d laid down for Suppository in the past.

I’m happy to say I was wrong to be sceptical as Boris’ vocal performance is probably the best of his musical career and is infinitely better than the piss poor performance Isaac did on the same tracks. Boris’ vocal style is more of a throaty raspy, but he’s able to mix it up with deep guttural snarls and the occasional high pitched squeal, but his overall performance just sounds a lot more polished. I believe Sven lay down a few backing vocals scattered throughout the effort as well, giving an overall strong vocal assault.

Musically the band has improved greatly since their debut, as well as changed a few roster positions over the years as well. Sven continues his solid progression as a drummer laying down simple, but effective, beats that fit the riffing perfectly. The song structures on The Process Of Elimination are a lot more varied than on past efforts, from thick meaty chugging riffs, to Swede-grind flair to Blood Duster groove, there’s a nod to nearly all of their favourite grind styles and bands here.

Even with all of the style changes, the album flows extremely well. The group also didn’t fill up the album with pointless movie samples as they have on past efforts, leaving this as a pure grind album with no samples to screw with the flow of the material.

Beginning to end this is by far one of the finest grind efforts of 2005 and is now my favourite Leng Tch’e release. The only major surprise for me on this effort was the album cover art and booklet layout weren’t handled by master digital manipulator Sven, but by an outside group of artists which actually turned out very well.

If you get any one Relapse album this year, The Process Of Elimination is the album to buy.

Written By: Teufel