Extreme Cold Weather

Messiah have always flown under the radar in the metal world, staying rather unknown to most metal listeners. The people that do know the band are probably simply familiar with the infamous album cover for Extreme Cold Weather, which is often regarded to be one of the worst album covers out there. However, don't let the cover fool you. The music on this album is mysterious and thrilling.

Messiah's style of playing is arguable, but the best fit is to place it in the "death-thrash" category. Throughout the album, we are treated with extremely fast riffing with screeching, pained vocals that sound like the vocalist is being tortured as he sings the high notes. The flurry of guitars and drums eventually slow right down into gentle keyboard ballads before flinging itself right back into the blizzard. Each song is very unique from one another, with vastly varying time signatures scattered throughout the album. One thing that is consistent, is the airy reverb effect that lays over all the music like a gentle blanket of snow, this helps balance out the music and saves your ears from the thrashing onslaught.

The bass is not very audible and is left in the shadows by the striking, piercing guitars that carry a very fuzzy tone. The drums are not anything to write home about, but at least they keep in time. The lyrical themes of the music varies quite a bit despite being an album focused on winter. The song "Hyper Borea", despite not having any lyrics, delves into the themes of hollow earth, and the title track describes a town frozen over by the titular Extreme Cold Weather.

Besides the actual album content, the flipside of the album is simply live versions of their previous album, Hymn to Abramelin. It does have some interesting live content, but its just not the place for this sort of thing. Extreme Cold Weather is far too short, and the other side could've been utilized for new material but is instead wasted on live songs that could've been put onto a separate record.

In conclusion, this album is a must-listen. Don't be fooled by the very literal album cover; this is an album that you need in your collection, just make sure to wear some warm clothes.

Top 3 Songs: Extreme Cold Weather, Hyper Borea, Mother Theresa

This batch got an inordinately big cult status in Bulgaria in the late-80’s, largely due to side B of the album reviewed here, this super-brutal, raw live rendition of their early material, the guys spitting fire and venom from the very top of the Swiss Alps, causing avalanches of vehement death-infused mayhem, those engulfing any practitioner at the time that wasn’t determined to blindly follow the oncoming death metal wave. Unpolished and viciously primal, this less-than-half-an-hour downpour of aggression was intimidating, to say the least, the exact opposite to the serious progressive avant-gardism which the band's compatriots Coroner and Celtic Frost started exercising at around the same time.

We’ll leave this side of this opus, however, and we’ll focus on side A; because we want to see how this new collection of hymns sounds, and whether it can hold a candle to the infernally brutal debut. Without much of a strain we’ll see that this new collection is both more proficiently-executed and less aggressive, and that it’s factually more or less intentionally religion-oriented, no goofy occultism propagated. To add more top-secret details to the hymnomania, there was this proposed campaign to populate the Swiss Alps with white bears some time in the late-80’s, a direct import from Russia, and the government officials over there organized an audition for the most suitable musical themes to help with the bears’ breeding. The thing is that the band under scrutiny here failed to win the fund as their sense of humour ran rampant here, making not very apologetic references to all kinds of luminaries (Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II), not to mention butchering their neighbours Austria’s most sacred tune, Johann Strauss’ ubiquitous “Radetzky March”.

Yep, a lot of mischiefs cooked within less than half an hour, Remo Broggi’s gang abandoning their occult predilections for extremely low temperatures and great white hunting trips, melting the ice with the dark brooding gothic-flavoured, deeply atmospheric title-track, a totally unexpected turn after the untamed vitriolic death/thrashing on the first instalment, the latter partially recalled with the short ripper "Enjoy Yourself", the joy abruptly turning towards the already mentioned Pope John Paul II with "Johannes Paul Der Letzte", a lyrical albeit vehement death/thrasher with poignant melodic developments. Next comes Mother Theresa with "Mother Theresa", a short quiet balladic all-instrumental etude, before the album erupts in a fountain of stylish ambitious, again all-instrumental thrashing with "Hyper Borea", the first actual indication that this choir has a lot more up their sleeves. "Radetzky March" is just a brief joke, the guys bashing with vigour, blasting with fury at some stage as well, the Strauss original existing on paper only as to recognize it behind this wall of violent chaos would be next to impossible. If Nero is your favourite Roman emperor then you'll surely have a field day with "Nero", another more complex shredorama, a lofty melody/aggression juxtaposition with an added lead-driven virtuosity.

In other words, the gothic warmth of the title-track isn't a leitmotif but remains a cool touch on a diverse, charmingly scattered recording, Broggi and Co. trying quite a few things along the way, obviously having fun with seriousness not a very urgent agenda (just look at the cover for a further proof of that), and by no means showing willingness to join the up-and-coming death metal campaign on a full-time basis. If the audience was expecting another compilation of brutally-composed hymns to Abramelin and other mages from esoteric folklore, it had probably remained somewhat disappointed as the Swiss heroes would apparently be a wild card on the late-80's metal horizon, retaining their brutal veneer but only as a building block, and never as an omnipresent wrap-around.

With their desire for bigger, not necessarily very compatible diversity, satiated, and with the hunts for the great white bears in the north proving beyond fruitful, the Messiah gang decided to elaborate on the more complex moments from the album here as a greeting gesture to the new decade. The rightest decision ever, leading to two outstanding opuses (one EP as well) but performed with a different line-up, Broggi bringing new musicians to the spotlight. No odes to saints and sinners this time around, just first-class complex, also quite atmospheric on occasion, death/thrash, without any modern contaminants. Broggi let his new comrades go, save for the drummer Steve Karrer, for "Underground", the collaboration with Therion's Christofer Johnsson, a modern adaptational post-thrash/post-death recording that wasn't bad at all, excluding the godawful "The Ballad of Jesus", the band's religious expletives still roaming around in a semi-conscious fashion.

A series of compilations, EP's, and live recordings has been peppering their emergence in the new millennium, the recently released "Fracmont" putting an end to this theretofore seemingly perennial trip down memory lane. This last so far opus also saw Broggi re-teaming with his colleagues from the early-90's recordings, the delivery not surprisingly mirroring the material recorded at that time. Expect pretty cool proggy thrash/death again, a climate-consolidating stint that is already doing a lot to stop the global warming disaster, and give the white bears a safe haven from their ice-melting predicaments. "Messiahs supreme, true leaders of men"... sorry, "bears"... but I think that's another, more innocent and chaster, band.

It’s summertime and the climate change is real. Europe is facing another very dry period and one can say that this is not the best prerequisite to write a review for an album called “Extreme Cold Weather”. But I am the more or less proud owner of this work since 1987, I have listened to the output in cold times as well, many years before even the most sensitive environmentalist was in fear of a climate change - and I must say that the here presented material never fascinated me very much.

The main problem of the album is its heterogeneity. Already the second track with the fairground organ at the beginning destroys the more or less cold atmosphere of the opening title track. “Mother Theresa” is a silent and useless guitar intermezzo that brings any kind of headbanging session to an end immediately. “Radetzky March: We Hate to Be in the Army Now” with its extremely distorted vocals and the mad chorus seems to be a kind of grindcore parody, but it does not fit the context of the album. Not to mention the B side - it consists of excerpts of three different live gigs without creating a consistent overall impression. In addition, it suffers from mediocre sound qualities. Especially “The Last Inferno” sounds like a mouldy demo tape and should have never been released on an official album. Aggravating the situation, there are more tracks that suffer from a rehearsal character.

The second problem is the fact that some parts are going nowhere, presenting speed for the sake of itself. “Johannes Paul der Letzte” marks a good example. Despite a few strong lines, the song in its entirety fails to leave a coherent impression. Neither the single parts can convince nor do they fit together very well. The excellent opening riff of “Golden Dawn” makes a promise most sequences of the remaining song cannot keep. The aforementioned “Radetzky March…” is also nothing else but a shot in the dark. Finally, it remains a mystery to me why a band that wants to be taken seriously calls a (good) song “Olé Perversus” – and the live recycling of nearly the whole A side of the debut makes no sense, too.

Good aspects? Yes, there are some, for example the sinister, mid-paced title track where the band makes good use of atmospheric synthesizers or the pretty mature, dark and menacing instrumental “Hyperborea”. These are the songs where early death / thrash metal reigns. Especially the instrumental shows many facets without falling victim to overly progressive patterns. Yet this is not enough to shape an album which deserves a high score. From my point of view, Messiah’s underground reputation was much bigger than their song-writing skills. Perhaps the albums of their second period, beginning with “Choir of Horrors”, showed the band in better form, but I decided to close the chapter “Messiah” after this album. Hopefully, this was not the moment when the climate change set in.

If there is one thing that probably shot way over the heads of most people immersed in the early death metal craze it was that the style was actually capable of having a rather tongue-in-cheek outlook, much like its thrash metal cousin. Perhaps part of this lay in the fact that Switzerland's Messiah were something of an unknown in many quarters and still largely are with regards to their earliest offerings. While the debut could have only been considered mildly comedic, "Extreme Cold Weather" could be described as one of the most overtly funny death metal albums to come out of the mid 80s, and believe me when I say that there is no accounting for subtlety for this thing, from the random album cover of a polar bear stalking the tundra to the lyrically bizarre contents contained within.

In terms of its sonic properties, this album has a more polished production that actually serves to bring the band much closer to their latent theatrical quality that was hinted to previous via some strong Hellhammer and occasional Mercyful Fate influences. Here the guitars are a bit less crunchy and frosty and possessed of a warm, yet dark character that is just a tad bit too smooth for what was going on in Florida by this state of the game. Nevertheless, when dealing with the actual riff work, this album thrashes with almost the same level of intensity as its predecessor, making perhaps a little bit more room for consonant melody here and there, but "Johannes Paul Der Letzte" (a very unsubtle jab at John Paul II) and "Enjoy Yourself" speed along with comparable fury to the most intense offerings off of "Seven Churches", though dressed up with plenty of abrupt tempo shifts along the lines of thrash meets doom.

Be all this as it may, the band also has kept their tendency towards having a strong atmospheric element mixed with a clear sense of transition from one song to the next. In contrast to "Hymn To Abramelin", the clean balladic passages have more of a spacey, nostalgic character to them rather than a creepy, horror movie feel. The little ditty "Mother Theresa" showcases a band willing to employ jazzy strangeness along similar lines to what was heard on Maiden's "Strange World" in a slightly more outlandish way. Likewise, each break from one song to the next comes complete with a breath of arctic wind (as opposed to reverb-drenched voiceovers), and the technique factor has been ratcheted up pretty significantly. Particularly in the case of the longer instrumental "Hyper Borea", the guitar gymnastics between the various sections is pretty difficult to miss and definitely showcases a more organized approach than that of Possessed or Slayer on the lead soloing front.

Perhaps the greatest flaw of this album, apart from being a little bit too silly, is that the proper studio material is extremely short, falling about 2 minutes shorter than even the overly short "Reign In Blood". There is a series of live songs that come along as a bonus to try and compensate for the lack of new material, but from song 1-7, this feels more like a slightly longer than average EP and leaves the listener hungry for more. The songwriting here is actually a bit less chaotic than the debut, but a better sense of organization doesn't quite redress the aforementioned issues, not to mention that simply saying "John Paul sucks" is a bit less death metal than Nuclear Assault's desire to hang him from a tree. Nevertheless, those hungry for more of what was brewing in the dark and murky world of thrash infused embryonic death metal back at the beginning will find another worthy pickup here.