MEKONG DELTA

In their first album we see some very promising material from MEKONG DELTA, their unique brand of technical thrash was quite ahead of it's time, a lot of these riffs are very unorthodox and combined with the odd timing and syncopation it makes for a compelling listen. The problem is that the album isn't terribly progressive and it's a little rough around the edges, the disparity between the good songs and the bad songs is quite large.

The opening track is a furious thrash number and is probably one of the fastest songs of their career, it's quite reminiscent of POSSESSED's Seven Churches album, especially the guitar solos. 'The Hut of Baba Yaga' is a very interesting song, an instrumental with some odd melodies and concepts brought forth, there really wasn't much like it around at the time and I really haven't heard something similar to this day, an exceptional song in concept and execution.

One thing MEKONG DELTA became renowned for was their melding of thrash instrumentation within a classical framework, there are 2 songs on here of this nature, 'Interludium' is a great little example of this, with the bass nicely syncopated at the right times underneath the violins and the double kick coming in at just the right times to add to the brooding atmosphere. 'Toccata' is the best song on the album and is one of the best examples of their classical and thrash amalgam completely relying on thrash instrumentation and yet it still maintains the illusion of being a classical work, it's really eye opening stuff.

Overall their debut is quite patchy with songs like the 'Black Betty' cover being something of a joke in comparison to the songs like 'Toccata', it's still a very worthwhile album though, recommended to fans of early Teutonic and technical thrash metal bands like CORONER (if you want a thrash band that does covers amazingly then CORONER are a good bet too).

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