The Final Journey

Black Messiah play a style under the father genre of black metal. Symphonic-ish, folky, "atmospheric" keyboards, and some blast and polka beats. Harsh vocals with occasional singing, topped off with wind sound effects and an icy image in their album art and video for the opening track, "Windloni".

I don't normally comment much about production values, and what the quality of the recording is, but this could benefit greatly from a more lo-fi approach. Being in the black metal realm, the production is way too polished, it sounds artificial. It lacks power. This is kind of like a "feh" version of Ensiferum's first album with some failing attempts at Bathory. Some very folky moments, with the polka beats, fiddles and more of a light hearted melody. I'm not sure how I feel about the overt lightheartedness of some of the sections. I once had some collections of Irish, German and Russian drinking songs; there are those same chord progressions going on here - too much for me, thanks.

The song "To Become a Man" is a good example of some black metal elements at work, but where is the bite? There is just no teeth to these parts. It's like Darkthrone for kids.

The title track takes about 2 minutes to do anything interesting, and I will admit the initial riff after the song finally picks up, is pretty nice. But other than that, generally unremarkable.

With the growing popularity and the dumbing down of Viking/black/folk metal, I become more jaded, and stuff like this does not make the cut. This band to me straddles the line between stuff like Bathory (genuine, quality music) and tripe like Alestorm (gimmicky self-parody), and I'm afraid leans more towards the latter.

It isn't outright bad, and nothing stands out as being off-putting. It's just that there is so little that's noteworthy or good about it. It's just slightly above average, and it has no grit and little charm. Blackish, folkish metal by numbers.