Messiah

Underground (Noise)
by Joe Hacking

Doom II is an ultra-violent Nintendo-type game for your personal computer. It makes Sega look like Atari Pong. You have seven weapons and a chainsaw to blast, cut, splatter, melt and vaporize demons, zombies, possessed humans and other minions of Hell. There are 36 levels.

Listening to Messiah‘s Underground (Noise), I blazed a gory, bloody path through four levels in record time. This Swiss quartet produce the perfect distillation of heavy metal and thrash to cut your way through Hell to. The thundering of the abyss (courtesy of drummer Steve Karrer and bassist Oliver Koll), the sharp-edged, zjugging guitars of R.B. Broggi and Christofer Johnsson’s demonic yowl belonged there with me in the depths of the Underworld. They were my personal marching band as I cut my swath of merciless destruction.

Messiah has been doing the death metal thing since ’84, so they know what they’re doing. They remember all the post-apocalyptic archetypes of those wacky, targeted-ICBM-’80s. Slowed down and full of savory, sludgy, walking rhythms,

Underground enforces the unfulfilled vision of nuclear hell on Earth. Yet this is not retro or nostalgia. It’s not a sold-out, grunge-death-metal-thing. It’s the death metal of the future. Johnsson’s vocals totter between gargling demon and whiskey drinking chain smoker. There’s no mindless speeding to the finish of the songs. Messiah channel all that energy into the underlying attitude injected into each song. They concentrate on the thunder rather than the lightning, making Underground perfect to kill demons to.