THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN

'The music of Erich Zann' is a decent follow up to MEKONG DELTA's self titled debut and shows a few more glimpses of the brilliance that was to come. The production on this album is unfortunately a lot poorer than on the previous one though, a lot thinner and grittier and not in the good thrash way. There are some great songs on here though which makes up for that, opener 'Age of Agony' is a great technical thrash song with some of the best riffs on the album. 'Memories of tomorrow' is indicative of the style of progressive thrash that would be evident on their masterpiece 'Vision's Fugitives', with more thrashy atonal riffs for the verse and a triumphant and melodic chorus, the sheer pacing of the song is great, there is some furious double kick work here driving it along too. 'The Gnom' is my favourite classical-thrash hybrid song to date from the band with some compelling guitar work featuring some interesting harmonisation and some brooding beastly mid paced double kick.

The instrumentation on this album is superb, the guitars provide some great thrashin' riffage and the solos are fairly musical for thrash. The drums are particularly good, great syncopation and technicality, they really add a lot to the music and make the songs a lot more interesting and along with the bass they make for a formidable rhythm section. The vocals don't seem to fit very well with the music in my opinion, they are quite high pitched heavy metal/power metal type vocals except a lot more aggressive, they don't detract from the music too much though.

MEKONG DELTA had failed to reach their full potential at this point but better things were certainly to come, they had shown great promise and churned out some great thrash songs but it hadn't quite gelled and they had a few shortcomings, for example on this album they reworked and redid one of the classical-thrash hybrid songs from their debut completely unnecessarily and didn't add anything new to it which is a disappointing recurring theme throughout their career unfortunately. A worthwhile album for curious thrash fans none the less.

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