Review by Rexorcist for Defeated Sanity - The Sanguinary Impetus (2020)

Until the apocalypse, there will be bands knocking off Cryptopsy and Suffocation, an unspoken genre you could call "brutal tech death."  Many of these albums have a tendency to sound like the knockoffs, save a few key bands like the Egyptian-oriented Nile, or the short and sweet band that's always changing their sound a little: Defeated Sanity.  A couple years ago I blew through all the Defeated Sanity albums just to get through another brutal death band.  The last of these was The Sanguinary Impetus, and by that point I must've been a little burnt out on brutal death because I only gave it an 8.5.

Now the band has had 27 years of experience when this was recorded, and it shows.  Our drummer, Lille Gruber, has been going about this career since the age of 11, and the practice has payed off.  He's able to create the mania of the album and keep it up throughout.  And all the while, the band is maintaining the strongest sense of insanity they've ever had, even more so than the much more avant-garde Psalms of the Moribund.  This keeps the album unpredictable and shocking until the end, even if you've technically heard the tricks before.  The glory of it is the randomness of it all feeling so utterly consistent that it largely overcomes its monotony by being to wild and wacky.  Despite the wackiness, there's a deep seriousness involved in the songwriting that lets you know that the band is trying harder than they've ever done.  In fact, because the distinct sound of the album doesn't overstay its welcome, the last two tracks are likely the best due to maintaining its unpredictable approach with stronger effect.

The Sanguinary Impetus is a modern death classic that does pure justice to a genre that's been beaten like a decomposed horse already pushing daisies.  There's hope for the genre as long as bands like Defeated Sanity focus as much on depth as brutality, and this is one of the heaviest death albums of the 2020's.