Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

We have got so used to the system that feeds off us, that we can no longer feel the pain of our mutual trauma, only the fear remains to guide and goad us on our collective ways. We have been caught singing for our daily bread by the proxy of mantra and found ourselves becoming addicted to the suffering we dearly need to dispense with if we are to return to a place of natural humanity.

Monster Mind Consuming, an album of complexity and deep seriousness, wrapped up in the hard shell of Metal and the comfort of the mysterious and magical, an album that sees Croatian legends Manntra release their second English-language recording, and one that asks so much of the listener that it is verging on grave mind intensity and the penetration of wits that accept blindly the war cry against all as just another false alarm caused by sheep fearing the shadow of the wolf.

Consume or be consumed, there seems to be no middle ground, and yet in tracks such as Invocation, Ori Ori, Slave, Barren King, the excellent I Want To Eat You and Lets Invite The Storm, Marko M. Sekul, Maja Kolaric, Andrea Kert, Boris Kolaric and Marko Purisic, the epic nature and force of the sound is one to be immersed in and yet rebel in the heart of its creation, to force the notion that consuming is an endorsement if it leads to knowledge, respect and empathy, anything else is just selling a person’s mind short.

In this particular battle cry, the passion of the Balkans flows with expressive demeanour and excitement, it is a storm breaking in the Adriatic and one felt the world over. In the war against yourself there can only be one winner, and better it be the one who thinks of the consequences and the die cast, rather than the foolish image to whom nothing fazes.

For Manntra this is a moment of truth, the moment where they combine eastern European thought with the universal language that can spread discontent as quickly as dispensing justice and reckoning; a Monster Mind Consuming and one that leaves the listener full and sated.

Ian D. Hall