The Cleansing - Poisoned Legacy
Deepsend Records
Death Metal
10 songs (41'05")
Release year: 2009
The Cleansing, Deepsend Records
Reviewed by Alex

Deepsend Records may be located in North Quincy, Mass, but they have definitely taken an interest with the Danish death metal scene. Not satisfied with signing Dawn of Demise, they are hereby introducing The Cleansing, which members seem to be rather experienced death metal players, all born and bred across Danish death metal underground.

Experience and pedigree of The Cleansing members shows in professionalism with which Poisoned Legacy is delivered. Downtuned, chunky and brutal, the album is superb in its tightness and precision. The Cleansing know how to be brutal, yet not bury the listener with technicality. Groovy riffs galore and just a couple of rhythm shifts per track is the prescription of The Cleansing death merchants.

The good news end here. As soon as the last note of Awoken at Gunpoint played I knew I wasn’t going to give this a glowing review. Sure, this style of death metal is not original, everybody and their brother, starting with Immolation and ending with the aforementioned Dawn of Demise, are playing it. The overall originality not being necessary, with their entire downtuned groove and bottom-of-the-barrel bellows by Toke Eld, the songs on Poisoned Legacy all sound like one continuous track. And the albums where you don’t notice that one song just ended and another already began are never a high score in my book. Just as unyielding in this brutality, The Cleansing never reaches the level of catchiness and interest of, say, Hail of Bullets on their breakthrough … Of Frost and War. As much as Dawn of Demise debut Hate Takes Its Form had songs which stood out on their own, Poisoned Legacy is very monolithic and a little sterile in its vicious approach. Perhaps, this just shows how thin the edge between the stand-outs and also-runs is in brutal death metal. It takes an Immolation to shake my foundations here.

As a result of repetitiveness, anything different from the norm on Poisoned Legacy becomes instantly memorable. Deliverance is shorter and thrashier, while The Domino of Phantom Effects takes a trip from Denmark to Benelux, reminiscent of God Dethroned in its slower morbid build-up. The following song Derelict is almost back to the business as usual, yet The Domino of Phantom Effects poison somehow spills over. The little off-the-wall stretches and pullbacks on guitar riffs in The Prodigal Son and Ghost Lights and ominous melodic moments of Harnessed by the Shadows are also worth noting.

Poisoned Legacy is one of those albums where I can’t find it in myself to say anything bad about it, but to say that I will be coming back to it time and time again is going to be a shameless lie.

Killing Songs :
The Domino of Phantom Effects
Alex quoted 60 / 100
Other albums by The Cleansing that we have reviewed:
The Cleansing - Feeding The Inevitable reviewed by Khelek and quoted 68 / 100
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