UMUR "Mekong Delta" is the self-titled debut full-length studio album by German thrash/progressive metal act Mekong Delta. My introduction to Mekong Delta was through their 2nd album "The Music of Erich Zann (1988)" which is an album I´ve owned for many years. It´s been a dust collector though and it´s only recently that I´ve gotten the curiosity back to seek out the rest of Mekong Delta´s discography.

This debut album by the band has a rather funny history as all musicians have other more international and not German sounding names even though they are all German citizens. This was alledgedly an attempt to disguise the true identities of the musicians involved. The album features many great musicians from the German metal scene though and Mekong Delta have nothing to be ashamed of with this release.

Behind some of the international sounding names we find musicians like drummer Jörg Michael (ex-Rage and later of Stratovarius fame), bassist and main-man behind the band Ralph Hubert (owner of record label Aaarrg and sound engineer for bands such as Warlock, Steeler and Living Death), and a couple of other ex-Rage musicians.

The music is a mix of traditional heavy metal and thrash metal all played in (for the time) great technical style. Strongly accented singing mared many German metal albums in the period but lead vocalist Wolfgang Borgmann does not contribute to that statistic. He is an excellent vocalist with no accents at all. Imagine Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) singing in more traditional heavy metal style and you´re just about there. A great asset to the band. The original LP version included a track called "Black Sabbath" which is a tribute to that band and features Black Sabbath song titles as lyrics. Unfortunately that song is for unknown reasons not included on the remastered Zardoz music CD version which includes the three songs "Toccata", "Black Betty" and "Interludium II" from the "Toccata (1989)" single instead. There are some great metal tracks on the album and I can´t help to bang my head whenever I listen to songs like "Back Home (in Hell)" and "The Cure". Progressive rock fans might find it interesting that Mekong Delta covers Mussorgsky´s "The Hut of Baba Yaga" which another famous progressive band also had tried their luck with about sixteen years earlier (that would of course be Emerson, Lake and Palmer).

The musicianship is excellent and in addition to the powerful vocal performance by Wolfgang Borgmann I also have to mention Jörg Michael´s drumming. He is such a precise and powerful drummer and already back then he sounded so much better than most other drummers on the scene.

The production is pretty good considering that most metal productions from 1987 sounded hollow and thin.

I´m really happy about this album but it has aged a bit and remains firmly stuck in the eighties. For fans of eighties heavy metal/ thrash metal this is a very worthy effort though and it fully deserves 3.5 stars from me.

Conor Fynes 'Mekong Delta' - Mekong Delta (6/10)

Germany has been a hub for metal since shortly after its inception, but it may be perhaps best known in the context of heavy metal of a very prolific thrash metal scene that dominated the 1980's. Bands like Sodom and Kreator come first to mind, and somewhere amidst this sea of Teutonic fury was Mekong Delta. Taking after the more inventive thrash acts- most notably Voivod and Watchtower- Mekong Delta plays a dissonant and quirky style of thrash on their debut. Although the grand classical fusion they would accomplish in later albums is only hinted at here, 'Mekong Delta' is a remarkably fun album to listen to, with a few songs standing out in particular.

In general, I have rarely ever found myself attracted to the style of thrash metal. The excessive speed and lacking sense of dynamic or variety is usually enough to turn me off to many of the bands, although the more inventive bands have made some very powerful stuff. Voivod was one of those bands, and their influence is evident in Mekong Delta, another thrash band that has really impressed me. The music here upholds the tenants of thrash metal; speed, over-the-top attitude, and aggressive riffs that would get a mosh pit fueled up in any live venue. What tends to put Mekong Delta's debut a step above the legions of other debuts that emerged from this period is simply its willingness to do something a little less predictable and different. There is a quick tease at classical music to introduce the second song 'The Cure', but the majority of the quirkiness comes from the dissonant guitar riffs, and Wolfgang Borgmann's all-over-the-place vocal sensibility. The songs here rarely let up their speed or traverse much of an emotional range, but the album is smart enough to end before the music stops being fun and starts getting tiresome.

'Without Honour' opens this album very nicely, with an intensity that most resembles Metallica's 'Fight Fire With Fire'. 'The Cure' is a standout track defined by Borgmann's wailing falsetto. 'The Hut Of Baba Yaga' is a more irregular track, an eerie and atmospheric cover of a band called Mussorgsky. There are quite a few more straightforward tracks on the album that don't do much for me, but 'Kill The Enemy' takes the unrelenting energy and channels it into something erratic, with the falsettos chiming in and guitars hinting at avant- classical chord structures. The high points on this album are some of the strongest German thrash metal numbers of the time, but 'Mekong Delta' is dragged down by songs like 'Nightmare Patrol' or 'Shiva's Return'; songs that while enjoyable and fun to listen to, don't offer much lasting impact or impression.

Mekong Delta may have been young and naive at this point, but they created a very good album on their first try. Things would get better still with their second album, where they would go on to address some of the problematic variety issues that this album suffers from. 'Mekong Delta' does not see this band meeting the level of the heavyweights, but the potential is here.