This week's CD is Revelations 23 by Mentallo and the Fixer. Now, the first thing you'll probably notice about this album is the awful, wretching, 70's nightmare cover art. With those bubbly pink letters and cheesy font, you would be forgiven for confusing this electro-industrial album for some epic trance or euro disco.

But you'd be quite mistaken, my friend. I almost didn't buy this album just because of the cover art, even though I've heard songs by Mentallo and the Fixer before and enjoyed them. So just ignore it. You know the saying about books and their covers...

Revelations 23 is dark, complex, and nuanced electro-industrial music. The CD I bought was a Metropolis (U.S.) reissue of the original. The album was published in 1993 by the legendary German electro label, Zoth Ommog. Zoth Ommog was responsible for injecting acts like Leather Strip, Funker Vogt, and In Strict Confidence into the industrial bloodstream.

R23 is a great album. There aren't much in the way of vocals, and they are typically subdued and hyper-distorted, becoming more like ambient noise or whisperings. The synth arrangements are deep and complex. The rhythms are suitably aggressive without being overly so. M&F uses acoustic drum samples and rock-style beats rather than trance/dance, recalling the early days of Skinny Puppy and songs like Addiction. The song structure, though, reminds me a lot of trance music. Listeners not used to electro, trance, industrial, or similar types of dance music will probably find M&F's songs overly long and repetitive. But to the attuned ear which can pick out the ingenious multi-layered synth arrangements, clever rhythms, ambient noises, and subtle pattern variances, R23 is a joy to listen to.

This is excellent mood music, with dark, doom-laden, and sometimes explosive thematic elements, and is good for relaxing (if your brain works like mine, that is). It definitely benefits from attentive listening, so the more you can concentrate on the subtleties of this album, the more you'll enjoy it. It's not one of those albums you pop into the car CD player when want to drive really fast. It's also probably not so good for contemporary dance floors, with their emphasis on four-on-the floor metronome-style bass beats, but it is danceable. Fans of Skinny Puppy's early work (especially the instrumentals) will probably like this album, but it doesn't veer into strange ambient genres and weird soundscapes like cEvin Key is apt to do - there's plenty of good, heavy beats to keep the electro-industrial fan happy.