The folks over at Deepsend Records really like their chunky Danish death metal, and particularly if it’s a band that features members of once respected Danish death metal acts. In the case of The Cleansing you have current and former members of Usipian, Iniquity, Corpus Mortale and Panzerchrist. And with label mates  Spectral Mortuary, you get basically half of Exmortem.

On their impressive 2009 debut, Poisoned Legacy, The Cleansing delivered a top notch mix of typically chunky Danish death metal infused with a hefty dose of tight, modern brutality. The band does that on Feeding the Inevitable too. The Cleansing might not be reinventing death metal, but they’re keeping fans of the genre–sick of retro re-runs or deathcore–very much satiated with ‘new’ stuff.

As with most Danish death metal the core of The Cleansing‘s sound is a burly, chunky and low end rumbling style of death metal that’s part European and part American. With Feeding the Inevitable the band seems to be a little more focused on a more technical, vicious tone rather than purely relying on groove and heft, that’s more Iniquity than Corpus Mortale.

But amid some of the truly furious material, there’s just enough crushing lumbering moments to remind you of the origins of this death metal behemoth. A perfect example is the otherwise blistering opening duo of “The Promethean Promise” and “Third Eye Staring” that inject just enough massive groove here and there — to beat you about and around from your head and neck. The balance is pretty much perfect as you can hear on the likes of  “Your Flesh, Your Curse” which mixes relentless US styled blasts with a nice moody Konkra-ish vibe and “Hour of Decadence” which has a furious opening and a menacing mid-song march. “Law of Reciprocity” and “Two Days” admittedly are more of the same, but they are delivered with precision and robust confidence.

That being said, The Cleansing understand the dynamics of an album as a whole entity and do manage to give the listener a slow burning breather by way of “Processed for Contamination”, which probably would have been better suited to close the album.

Feeding the Inevitable is yet another solid release from Deepsend and The Cleansing. Along with Spectral Mortuary‘s fine second effort, as well as previous releases from the likes of Offending, Fleshrot, Diluvian and Dawn of Denise, Deepsend seem to have been blessed with a very solid stable of underrated, but very competent, European death metal.

[Visit the band's website]

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