Review Summary: An interesting and at times chaotic martial industrial album from members of Hollenthon, Pungent Stench, and Summoning.
Kreuzweg Ost is best known for featuring two of Austria's best known metal musicians, Silenius and Martin Schirence (Summoning and Pungent Stencht respectively). I should warn the reader though that this project does not resemble the musicians' other projects in any way. This is not metal, it's not heavy, nor is it melodic. The music itself is somewhere between dark ambient and martial industrial, drawing mostly from the later.
The music is mostly comprised of sound samples, with most of the work lying in the arrangements and structures and sample selection rather than melodic composition for the two. There are drums and minimal synth parts added to the fray but for the most this album is unique as it relies purely on a storytelling and atmospheric base. The samples all have historical and political backgrounds, and often are connected to European history and wars of the early 20th and late 19th centuries.
The album achieves it's goal of recreating these tales to a certain extent. The first hindrance is that most will not fully understand this album because samples are dominantly in the german language, with some english and italian and slavic languages as well. That makes understanding the stories of each song difficult to someone who only speaks english. The samples are sometimes also blurred by extremely harsh drum sounds that are very high in the mix and give the album a good bit of chaotic, like a warfield, atmosphere.
The samples also focus on music of older times, such as polka samples, a capella music that served as propaganda in times of war, and military drum parts. Overall the album suffers from severe niche appeal, most metal fans won't be interested, and even history fans and martial industrial fans might find this hard to get into since the spoken samples make up so much of the atmosphere of the album. I recommend getting Edelrost first as it is far more accessible out of the two KWO albums. I recommend this only to fans of Edelrost, and martial acts like H.E.R.R., Toroidh, Arditi, and Wappenbund.
