Well, this is a nice surprise. Switzerland gave us some pretty extreme metal in the 80’s, Messiah were very much a part of that with their death/thrash combo. In itself at the time, there wasn’t so much of this style around. I remember the Noise Records era, ‘Rotten Perish’ and ‘Choir of Horrors’ in particular, although by ‘Underground’ I had admittedly moved on. In the early part of their career, there were two main releases. ‘Hymn to Abramelin’ and ‘Extreme Cold Weather’. These are much rawer than the three I mentioned earlier with less melody. At the time you had the legacy of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost punishing the airwaves, later joined by Fear of God in the Swiss scene. Another good thing to note, those two raw early releases have recently been re-released by High Roller Records.
As for ‘Fracmont’, I feel the sound and song structures are a natural progression to both ‘Choir of Horrors’ and ‘Rotten Perish’. The guitar sound is raw but has a lot of mid-range, a lovely crunchy sound. The songs include many choral/biblical instrumental pieces, as the band say also, their lyrical topics have also remained true to their legacy. But rather than going full on retro, they have managed to augment their sound and song structures to combine all the element of the Messiah back catalogue in fairness. I don’t hear any more recent external influences included either.
The title track is over 9 minutes, I did feel before I listened that this maybe too much and had the band gone prog! Far from it, there are still the brash death metal moments coupled with the more melodic sense of thrash, hence why I initially said earlier it’s a fair continuation of two of their releases, less chaos than their debut material! Andy Kaina provides the vocals (still my favourite Messiah vocalist as you may have guessed from my name checking constantly of ‘Choir of Horrors’ and ‘Rotten Perish’!). The clarity and growl remains good to this day, there is certainly no loss of power with time. The arrangements themselves vary quite nicely. ‘Singularity’ is upbeat and much more in keeping with death metal and similarly the wondrous ‘Children of Faith’ rears its angst with triumphant results. The latter gives me the same chills as recent Possessed material. ‘Dein Wille Geschehe’ continues the annihilation making the centre section of the album a cool upbeat death assault with dexterous thrash riffs. Towards the end of the album, the tracks expand and gain more depth, cleverly adopting pre-recordings and other atmospherics. All in all, nostalgia has had a kick in the arse!
After more than 25 years since their last release, like Possessed and fellow countrymen Poltergeist did recently, Messiah have really set the bar high with their comeback album. An album that’s not a re-hash of past glories, but actually sounds fresh and new with a few similarities thrown in for good measure for the die hard fans. ‘Fracmont’ writhes effortlessly above many of their peers in the current scene, and it just goes to show, that some bands are worth the wait!
(8.5/10 Paul Maddison)
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