Having made a big splash with their 1991 debut, Teignmouth, Germany's Love Is Colder Than Death returned the following year with Mental Traveller--more of the same, really, but who could quibble? Susann Heinrich floats her sensuous, ethereal voice over Maik Hartung and Ralf Donis's elegant, cathedral-like symphonics, and it's all you can do not to melt away as the sweeping grandiosity of it all holds you in its spell. Fans of Dead Can Dance will be pleased by Heinrich's Lisa Gerrard-like tones, but there the similarity more or less ends, since all of LICTD's music is electronically generated and Heinrich possesses neither the presence nor the range of a diva like Gerrard. (A truer gauge might place Heinrich a hair closer to Bel Canto's Anneli Drecker, a siren in her own right.) Like Teignmouth, Mental Traveller is a schizophrenic mix of styles, neatly divided between the two halves of the disc. The first seven tracks are strictly Heinrich, backed by heavenly orchestral keyboards and, in some cases, light percussion. The last five songs see Hartung and Donis flex their muscles and perform a series of dark, industrial-flavored cuts with male vocals and more-aggressive electronic percussion. Strangely enough, the two parts of the disc work well together and prevent Mental Traveller from being crushed under the weight of its own beauty. After all, heaven doesn't exist without hell. --Steve Landau
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