Details: High Roller Records; With their sophomore full-length, Mekong Delta expanded on the progressive thrash metal formula they had established on their debut in 1987. Released only one year later, "The Music of Erich Zann" is a fully fledged concept album based on the story of the same title by cult horror author H.P. Lovecraft. "Being a fan of his works, I had been toying with the idea for quite a while", says band leader Ralf Hubert. "The story of a solitary musician who fights evil with his playing actually ticks all the boxes for metal, yet since I saw it as an allegory of the time back then, the lyrics had to be particularly consistent." Together with Rage front man Peavy Wagner, who had also written the lyrics for the first record, the group created an atmospherically dense and engaging album which, while taking countless twists and turns, was more on point than it's predecessor. While 'Hatred' and 'Confession of Madness' serve as angry attacks on real-life politics and the media, 'Interludium' (from Bernard Herrmann's iconic soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's thriller masterpiece "Psycho") and the initial bonus track 'The Gnome' (Modest Mussorgsky, whose works Mekong Delta have frequently cited throughout their entire career) highlight the quartet's penchant for avant-garde and classical music. Add tracks like the breakneck 'True Lies' or the expansive 'I, King, Will Come', and you have a compelling musical narrative for which the term "thinking man's metal" seems to have been invented. This 2024 edition of "The Music of Erich Zann" was remastered by Patrick W. Engel.