Hymn to Abramelin

If there’s anything that music history has taught us, then it’s that the rapid development of extremity would change metal forever. While bigger names have undeniable received credit for their participation, plenty would unfortunately fly under the radar; as in the case with Messiah.

Messiah would gradually move on with the times, but at this stage, they were a dangerous creature that hints more towards extreme metal’s future than its past. Clonky drums remind me of early (pre-Kisser) era Sepultura, while an unhinged voice covered with distorted already sounds worlds apart from your everyday thrash-inspired yeller of the 80’s. The biggest surprise that the band has in store would be the unrefined, if versatile guitars. There’s plenty of rough thrashing going on here; but when the band ends up on the extreme side of the spectrum, things drastically change. On one hand, we’re dealing with Sarcófago styled berserk tracks like ‘Messiah’ and ‘Anarchus’, which both feature enough razor-sharp guitar riffs that could tear your body in half. On the other hand, Messiah aren’t afraid to slow the hell down and this where I’m getting reminiscent of later bands that would take Celtic Frost’s sludgy riffs to the next level. 'Space Invaders' comes crashing down with grand guitars, but ‘Total Maniac’ basically sounds like the prototype of early (read: Dutch) doom/death metal; bringing to mind the vivid imagery of an elephant stomping on its helpless victims without mercy.

Each track has its own specific textures and while I could nitpick about the lack of proper flow, expecting the unexpected is part of the record’s charm. Besides, how many extreme metal records from this time were this versatile, anyway? I suspect that any extreme metal nerd will get something out of Hymn to Abramelin. You’ve got familiar thrash metal riffs, a good dose of early black metal, while the most punishing guitars nod towards the gigantic doom/death metal realm that would emerge in the years ahead. If there’s one track that sums up most of Messiah’s crazy ideas, then it ought to be ‘The Dentist’. This atmospheric album closer exposes mankind’s deepest fears (the dentist?) with verses that spiral into madness, a healthy dose of thrash-fueled riffs to spike your blood sugars with and clear examples of blastbeats-driven death metal once the track reaches its most primal form.

Although Messiah hardly run out of ideas, they occasionally show a lack of focus. ‘Future Agressor’ happily gallops into fields of battle, but it’s a tad underwhelming when compared to the maniacal outbursts and mace-stomping tunes that surround the track. I’m also not sure ‘Thrashing Madness’ is supposed to represent; with random screams scattered in between some pointless guitar noodling, it’s certainly no madness, nor does it thrash very well to begin with. Let’s just call it plain filler instead - but I promise you, this is the only exception to the rule.

Ideally, Hymn to Abramelin should have been considered a lost classic. Way ahead of its time, it marks a great start of this band, yet it’s unfortunate that none of the band’s following albums turned out as well as this one. While the band’s ‘proper’ death metal albums from the early 90’s sound more cohesive, I’ll hardly call them exciting and let’s face it; the best thing about Extreme Cold Weather is that incredible cover artwork. Hymn to Abramelin remains a personal highlight of extreme metal's unrefined early days and hopefully, it will be one of yours, too.

This review was originally written for antichristmagazine.com

Messiah came out of the dark. They had an extremely obscure image at the time of the release of "Hymn to Abramelin" and therefore I was very curious. I bought the album and well, shit happens. It failed to live up to my high expectations. Due to their Swiss origin, the band members appeared as the little brothers of the Celtic Frost line-up. Bad luck, their elder brothers had the better generic material. However, back in 1986, every band that broadened the scene was welcome. (Today things have changed; we have more bands than fans, but I do not intend to tell this tale now, because it would go far beyond the scope of this text.)

Messiah spit out nine examples of more or less extreme metal. Sometimes they put the focus on black metal, sometimes thrash prevails. The album wants to generate a demonic aura and short spoken intermezzos between the songs, recorded with a lot of reverb, intend to add an intellectual touch. That's fine, but these circumstances cannot conceal that some compositions are flat, meaningless and a bit scatterbrained. For example, the nonsensical hammering of the seemingly insane drummer kills a lot of the actually powerful band anthem. In addition, the rigorous "Thrashing Madness" lacks of consistency and sophistication, despite its promising opening riff. The concept of this instrumental is too simple with the consequence that the song suffers from a lack of substance. The obscurely titled, overlong closer "The Dentist" shows an affinity for slightly progressive sounds, but it offers just a mishmash and fails to impress me.

Anyway, Messiah could not be blamed for being absolute beginners. Despite its primitiveness, the slow-moving "Total Maniac" develops a certain malignancy. "Future Aggressor", an almost introvert piece, features a simple yet brilliant riff, mean verses and a chorus which is successfully reduced to the essentials. The subsequent "Empire of the Damned" unites apocalyptic fury with scary sequences. Especially its ending creates a remarkable density. Thus, excellent and pretty dubious parts are keeping each other in check, while the technical implementation of the songs spread the spirit of the underground. Less poetically, this album appears as a more or less carefully recorded demo. For example, several solos sound pretty chaotic.

In its most lawless moments, Messiah's music borders on bestiality, but we have to keep in mind that this is the beast of 1986. Since then, legions of extreme metal bands have brought much more dangerous creatures to life and from today's point of view, Messiah's beast seems to be almost toothless. Having said that, it goes without saying that those, who seek the most barbaric album, should stay away from these hymns. Yet these maniacs who want to get back to the source of dark and mind-expanding music should give the album a try.

Messiah is arguably one of the most well kept secrets of the early death metal scene, being present during the formative period where said genre, along with thrash and black metal were all fairly difficult to separate from each other, both for very similar lyrical pursuits and also a generally comparable sound aesthetic that reflected the dark spirituality of the time period. Circa 1986, there wasn't really anything that resembled what became death metal in the early 1990s, let alone what it has since become, but some indicators can be found in various bands. In Messiah's case, there are greater indications of a developing death/thrash sound by the time "Hymn To Abramelin", an extremely raw and vicious offering by the standards of the time, but there is still a lingering black metal presence that reminds of the works of early Venom and Sodom prior to the release of "Persecution Mania".

Commonalities between this album and that of Hellhammer, Bathory, Sepultura, and Possessed (among a few others) are pretty easy to pick out, as this album comes packed with an extremely sinister and wicked sound that was still considered a fringe element even 3 years after the release of "Show No Mercy" and 2 years after the earliest Sodom releases. The vocal character of this album is a bit more high-pitched than the grunting character of Chuck Schuldiner, which this band would adopt in the early 90s, but what it may lack in guttural nastiness it makes up for in maddened raves. The production quality is laced with enough reverb to upstage the most open sounding of concert halls, and a frequent usage of brief spoken intros with a particularly heavy reverb aesthetic gives this album something of a theatrical quality that isn't too far off from early Mercyful Fate (another indirect tie this band shares with the eventual Norwegian 2nd wave in terms of common influence).

Nevertheless, from a musical standpoint this album is far more centered in the thrashing character of "Seven Churches" and "Morbid Visions" than the chunkier, heavier, more consistently chaotic character of the first couple of Death albums, though those were in turn largely closer to Slayer musically than what the style became by 1991. The transitions between fast and slow are a bit more abrupt and extreme than what had been explored by Slayer up till this point, but most of the faster elements at play on here are based in the rapid, tremolo picked riffing character that typified "Hell Awaits". The only area where things get a little bit out of character by 1986 standards is the blast beat utilized on "Messiah", arguably the most overtly death metal leaning of all the songs found on here. But overall, there is still a pretty strong helping of NWOBHM influenced riffing here that plays to the typical evolution of this time period, and along for the ride is the usual fits of fast and flashy lead guitar work, which actually doesn't resemble Slayer so much as it does the speed metal shredding character of the earliest Teutonic thrash offerings.

While overshadowed by the likes of "Pleasure To Kill", "Seven Churches" and "Morbid Visions", this is an excellent formative album that should definitely be considered, and not merely for its historical significance. While it's production quality is a bit low-fi next to what became standard amongst the Bay Area scene, it definitely conforms quite nicely to what has since become a preferred sound within the post-2nd wave era of black metal, and anyone with any level of appreciation for the formative 1st wave black/thrash acts of the early 80s will find something pretty close to what was burning up the underground at that time. The narrations get a little bit comical at times, but what happens immediately after their brief input is not to be missed.

Messiah's Hymn To Abramelyn is the proof some things that have been done before can be further advanced into something much more reasonable and interesting which coincidentally ends sounding not very alike it was supposed to originally be. On addition to the obvious Thrash inheritance, this work emanates several peculiarities 'parallel' to Death Metal that appear to be chronologically unconceivable for its time and location. I will further explain some of the characteristics that later were reintegrated to the Death Metal genre. Excellent background lead-guitar orchestration and effects that very hardly fall into a total wanking mayhem and the obtuse incorporation of slower acerbic parts are things most Thrash Metal bands of that time failed to successfully do, but Messiah possessed the knowledge to put the theory in practice in the most paradoxical way. While most Thrash bands attempted to either follow the jolly Bay Area sound that generally came up being more so technically advanced and cocky or the German evil tremolo-centered abrupt sound that in some ways preceded the Black Metal genre, Messiah remained (voluntarily) excluded from both groups (although in some aspects, it would be stupid to deny it resembles German Thrash). This album is indeed malignant but not in the way Bathory and Sodom were, the previous bands incorporated satanic imagery and an overall more 'demonic' sound that was less reflective and crude in nature.

Messiah, on the other hand had little to do with Satanism, it rather focuses on projecting a authoritarian explorative sound through agonizing yelling through somewhat high-pitched vocals, quasi-elemental rigid drumming and exceptional use of background feedback effects and minor melodies that also aggrandize the already evident composing skills of the band in both literary and figurative ways. This is not to say these previous aspects are the only things that make this album somehow singular, as the production and the remaining instruments broaden much of the album maniatic display of sonic revolt. Another surprising (but not really outstanding) thing surrounding this album is the atonishingly comprehensive production. Aye, this is perfect not in the way everything is utterly polished and medically clean to not offend lobotomized organic auditive channels, this is perfect in a way that transcends perfection itself. It doesn't sacrifice the rawness of the album but successfully mitigates all of the annoying strains that would just be stain layers to the album's crust.

The excruciating omnipotent melodic structure of this album, is however, with no doubt the most treasurable thing that integrates within the whole work. All of each players affirm a commutative democratic songwriting where none of the instruments is overwhelmingly independent from the others, leading to a coefficiently executed monumentally ultra-violent scenario that doesn't cycle itself into a rythmical and choral self repetition. It renders a withstanding riff-pattern alternation that frequently overpowers the vertiginousity of the abrupt rythmic structuralism in a then-oddly arranged manner. From the uncontrolled thrashing disorder to the harmonically rich twilighted slower power chord parts and from the texturally mighty figure-rich sweeps and tremolo cohesiveness to the Celtic Frost inspired tragic mid-paced melodic constructions and from the cathedratically delayed hoarse and high-pitched vocals to the highly evident bass roar and the rythmically enduring obstreperous drumming this album coheres itself in a impressive way.

However, as most things on Earth, this has some defects I can't pass through, now on a more crude and way less eloquent grasp of the English language I am going to briefly point out some deficient things about this: the vocals that themselves are a cataclysmic high-point on the album's doomed parts paralleling at times a less exaggerate execution of a style unsurprisingly resembling the techniques used on Triumph of Death, generally get annoying at its faster paces to the point of self-ridiculing themselves in a grotesque way. The bonus-song 'Mortal Bells', although being constituted in a completely different form, has its main riff almost directly taken from Slayer's Crionics. The spoken intros are unnecessary filler that are normally lacking creative depths (disgusting reverberation).

This is to say that even although the album is not that close to perfection, the low-points remain brutally outnumbered by the high-points. The interesting thing of hearing this album is that you can hear and analyze an embryonic version of sharply executed deconstructed part-atonal songwriting that became a generality on Death Metal (an exception become a rule). Don't let negative arguments foolish you. If you enjoy Massacra, Unleashed and Asphyx you will enjoy this.

Overall, Hymn to Abramelin is a very good album considering the occasional problems that really aren’t that big of a deal. If you like raw, fast and down right evil thrash this is an album you should definitely pick up.

Messiah, the first official track, was the only song that didn’t start with a short sound clip. It came in hard and fast as hell with great evil sounding screaming vocals. The drumming was pretty repetitive, nothing all that special just mainly the usual blast beats and occasional breakdowns at the chorus, which was good through out the song until the end where it got kind of obnoxious. Nice riffs, very thrashy, raw, and very fast. Over all I can say that I enjoyed that song.

Anarchus, second track, started with another short sound clip then flew right into the guitars and drumming. This song was ok, the riffs and overall music was nice, very fucking fast and thrashy, but the vocals were up and down. The high pitched vocals in the beginning completely through me and he sounded pre-pubescent. Although he made up towards the end with the usual thrashy vocals, very nice and having much better high pitched screams towards the middle of this track.

Space Invaders is much slower than the other tracks, but sounds evil as hell. At about the middle it sporadically got fast as fuck then went back to going slow. Which, might I add, I very much liked because it was built up from the impatience of it being slow. Meaning that it came in at just the perfect time.

Thrashing Madness of course was completely thrashy and fast. Great riffs and a VERY nice solo at about the end. There weren’t really any vocals except for a few screams, which were also very fucking nice.

Future Agressor is probably the more catchy out of all of the tracks. Pretty damn heavy with very memorable riffs and tightly put together with the vocals coming in at the right moment.

Empire of the Damned is, like 80% of the album, fucking fast as hell.

Total Maniac another slow song, but also having an evil sound. This one though being kind of boring. With the title Total Maniac I would figure that it would be another really fast and more heavy track, but I guess you can’t judge by the title. Although it is kind of boring speed wise, it’s nothing to throw out. It is still a good track with the vocals being really fucking great and having a nice solo. Plus, they did add it on to the track list at just the right time in between the more speedy tracks, giving the listener a change.

The Dentist changed a few times in speed rate. Started off fast then went pretty slow then fast again and so on. The Dentist is definitely a highlight and probably my favorite track. 8 minutes of great fucking riffs, oh and NICE fucking solos, just perfect. The vocals being completely fucking evil and going perfectly with the feel of the song. This track making this album completely worth the purchase.