RAMMSTEIN

To promote their forthcoming "Videos 1995-2012" package, RAMMSTEIN dishes up a five track maxi-single for "Mein Herz Brennt", the dank yet epicurean opening number of their 2001 album "Mutter".

Depending on which video clip you call up, the standard rock version or the newly-touted piano version, you're guaranteed to be creeped out by Till Lindemann's garish performance art. His Gaiman-esque transformation from androgynous hedonist to mutated man-roach in the rock version of "Mein Herz Brennt" will leave an impressionable haunt afterwards. In the stripped-down piano version, Lindemann comes off like a flagellated, alpha-bred mockery of Pris from "Blade Runner" as he taunts the camera's eye and dares his audience to cross into his perverse fugue before slipping into subterfuge down, of all things, an emptied hot tub.

By association, what the "Mein Herz Brennt" maxi-single has to offer new is the piano interpretation of the song, once bearing Lindemann's vocals, repeated later as an instrumental. For certain, there's a beleaguered sorrow rolling through the piano versions, isolated as stark revelations to something far more sinister than when they serve as parts to the original track. As the translation of "Mein Herz Brennt" equates into "my heart burns," cued images of sodden red wax down sweltering candelabras simulating blood are impossible to push from the mind's eye.

The studio cut of "Mein Herz Brennt" is presented as an abbreviated video edit, followed by the industrial-grooved (LAIBACH and SKINNY PUPPY in nature, surprise surprise) "Boys Noize" remix, all good fun in the latter case. However, the main notable to this package is the previously-unreleased "Gib Mir Deine Augen", a compact crunk jam with a harrowing piano intro and outro plus a dense, Gothic throb that's even weightier than much of their most-recent full-length, "Liebe Ist fur Alle Da".

If anything, this package dissects one of RAMMSTEIN's generally-overlooked-yet-powerful numbers by opening the wounds that inspired it and tapping the skein. Bloodletting is about in this old-is-new counterpoint between hammering rock modes and Baroque processionals into despair, offering a bit more than just an unapologetic marketing pitch.