Rammstein Herzeleid

Producers: Jacob Hellner, Carl-Michael Herloffson.Rammstein's first album was about what was to be expected from a bunch of Germans who happily grew up on everything from Skinny Puppy to Depeche Mode to Laibach and back again, not to mention plenty of skull-crushing metal straight up. Precisely brutal and often brilliantly arranged -- the band aren't per se inventive, but they bring everything together to make something astonishingly radio-friendly out of something that isn't necessarily -- HERZELEID in particular is the logical conclusion of KMFDM's self-referential electro-metal. The band freely invokes its own name throughout the way that group did in its songs -- the final tune is called "Rammstein," to top it all off -- and the riffs readily connect the dots between the older band's clipped guitar bursts and their even more compressed nu-metal equivalents. The swaggering sass and stomp of "Wollt Ihr das Bett in Flammen Sehen" makes for a near-perfect start, and from there the band