Mental Cruelty – 'Echoes of a Forlorn Land' review: frighteningly beautiful
Mental Cruelty blend blast beats with choirs, folk and violins. METAL HAMMER gives it 5.5 out of 7 and hears the band's strongest record yet.
Graphic: TERRA WORLD NEWS (own graphic based on the sources listed)
Single video: YouTube · Century Media Records · youtube.com
Single: Helheim
On 'Echoes of a Forlorn Land', Mental Cruelty deliver eleven new songs via Century Media. For METAL HAMMER critic Carina Seiffert, it is the band's strongest LP yet and, compared with predecessor 'Zwielicht', a particularly eerie work. She praises the dark, morbid atmosphere, the theatrical arrangements with symphonic elements and choirs, and the hypnotic double bass drumming.
Singer Lukas Nicolai adds macabre pig squeals. She singles out 'Blood For Blood', which blends mournful folk with ambient passages and gains enormous force towards the end, and 'Helheim' with its folk melodies, ominous violins and chanting. 'The epic quality typical of Mental Cruelty is by no means lost,' Seiffert writes.
Her verdict: the album creates 'a deep feeling of unease' – and sounds frighteningly beautiful doing it. The video is the official music video for 'Helheim', a song featuring David Simonich of Signs of the Swarm as a guest on the breakdown.