Mekong Delta – Wanderer on the Edge of Time (2010)

With a newly revamped lineup (since the last album), Mekong Delta is finally back with their Thrash infused Progressive Metal. Ralph Hubert as the only remaining original member, Mekong Delta comes out of the shadows to release a very solid album with “Wanderer on the Edge of Time”. For somebody that has been doing music since the 80’s we could only expect nothing but the best and Mekong Delta delivers on this promise.

Recruiting Martin LeMar of Tomorrow’s Eve on vocals and Alex Landenburg of At Vance on drums, the band sounds like nothing has been really lost since their last album “Lurking Fear”. With fifteen tracks and around 50 minutes of music, “Wanderer on the Edge of Time” is arranged in a manner that allows the listener to get fully immersed on the musical experience provided on this album. All the “Zwischenspiel” or interludes (5 in total) in this album allow the transitions between tracks to be simple and elegant.

The first thing we noticed about “Wanderer..” is that the whole album has a slower pace than the majority of Progressive Rock/Metal releases we usually get. For us, this allows us to fully enjoy the musical abilities of the band members since we (almost) never had to be quickly racing between the notes to fully enjoy the guitar solos, bass guitar line, and the drum track. Note we are not saying the music is ‘simple’, we are just pointing out that nothing is ridiculously overdone in a way that will mesmerize you with speed and confuse you at the same time since there is so much stuff going on at once.

The ‘simple’ riffing has plenty of Thrash Metal influences and it sounds very interesting to us, since it creates heavy tracks that are accentuated by the little subtleties of musical brilliance that the Progressive Metal elements bring to the mix. The emotional vocals of LeMar fit very well with this type of slower music, but also go almost full-on Power Metal in songs like “Mistaken Truth”.

Like we mentioned earlier, the mixture of emotional tour-de-force songs like “A Certain Fool” paired next to interludes of musical acrobatics works magically for “Wanderer..”. We can truly see that Ralph Hubert made a great job in putting together a very good group of musicians and writing a great album.

Overall, we love Progressive Metal, and it’s easy to see that albums like Makong Delta’s “Wanderer on the Edge of Time” will surely be timeless masterpieces. We definitely recommend this one for all fans of Yes, Dream Theater, Ayreon, etc. and we will surely be keeping an eye out for this amazing band in the future.

Release: June 11th, 2010

Country: Germany