Messa - Doom from the Po Valley

Messa are a Venetian band formed in 2014 who have revitalized the European doom scene thanks to a range of influences not usually found in the better-known bands of doom metal. But it's above all through their live performances, rather than their studio albums, that the band has - over the past few years - raised its international profile to the point of becoming a reference point for the European doom scene.

The quartet made up of Alberto Piccolo (guitar), Marco Zanin (bass), Rocco Toaldo (drums) and Sara Bianchin (vocals), starting obviously from the sound of Black Sabbath, has managed to carve out its own identity, avoiding becoming just another of the thousands of bands spawned by Ozzy & co., thanks to psychedelic sounds drawn from the 1960s, stretching things out between the drone-music of Sunn O))) and the dark-jazz of Dale Cooper Quartet, echoing the contemporary dark sound of Chelsea Wolfe as well as the extreme sounds of Electric Wizard, with constant accelerations and decelerations intersecting with moments that come close to jazz and even ethnic music. Almost as if Black Sabbath were meeting Dead Can Dance, or as if the most sprawling black metal of Mizmor or Urfaust crossed paths with be-bop.

Their 2016 debut is Belfry, which immediately stands out thanks to an iconic cover featuring a black-and-white photo of the famous flooded bell tower of Lake Resia. While the cover clearly evokes the black metal world, the sound sticks to a convincing but fairly traditional doom-hard-psych approach. The main tracks are preceded by instrumental intro pieces, like "Alba", with a long bass solo that sets up "Babalon", whose monolithic doom riff makes for a perfect calling card for Messa's music. The guitar sounds powerful but leaves room for Sara Bianchin's voice to emerge from the chaos. It's a remarkable voice, perhaps not fully exploited by the band, that sounds like something between Chelsea Wolfe's and that of fellow Italian Virginia Monti, singer of Psychedelic Witchcraft. The atmosphere grows darker on the album's most elaborate track, "Blood", with a slow, Sabbath-esque riff that evolves to find a meeting point between black and drone metal (the repeated guitar chord), leading into a long, decidedly psychedelic final trip.

The remaining tracks stick closer to doom tradition, with the exception of the acoustic "Confess", which closes the album.

Feast For Water (2018) is a more mature work that explores different approaches. After an intro bordering on dark-ambient ("Naunet"), we arrive at the usual energetic tracks like "Snakeskin Drape" or the monolithic "Leah", which try to showcase Bianchin's voice, too often lost within a fairly vintage guitar-driven context. "She Knows" employs a keyboard sound that's unusual for the doom world, while "The Seer" plays up the Indian-raga psychedelic side, battered by bass and guitar distortion.

The band reaches its peak with "Tulsi", which cleverly adds the sound of sax, decidedly alien in a doom metal context, but ultimately doesn't bring their music much closer to jazz, if anything recalling the use of the same instrument by Pink Floyd on "The Dark Side Of The Moon".

A bit too little to call it a miracle, but Messa certainly hint at an attempt at renewal.

Soon, however, their name becomes one of the most admired on European festival bills. And much of the credit goes to the new album Close (2022), followed by a very long and thrilling tour. The cover, showing African dancers with movements reminiscent of metal headbanging, already tells us part of what to expect. "Suspended" opens with the usual slow bass-and-keyboard intro before exploding into a memorable riff with Sara Bianchin's vocals finally showing off her full potential; at a certain point jazz guitar chords completely change the scenery, leading into a blues solo. All of it interesting, even if perhaps not 100% cohesive, it's still one of the best tracks in their discography.

The adrenaline-fuelled "Dark Horse", with its accelerations and decelerations, is the metal peak of the record, while "Orphalese" sounds like an experiment blending ethnic music and Middle Eastern neofolk, a sort of ideal middle ground between Bombino and Dead Can Dance.

An opportunity unfortunately wasted is "Pilgrim", thrilling in its first minutes (Eastern psychedelia) before spinning its wheels in an overlong doom interlude, while the ten minutes of "0=2" stand out mainly for an opening that is once again Indian raga, and for a delirious closing guitar-and-sax finale. Amid nostalgic hard-psych moments ("If You Want Her To Be Taken") and a random one-minute black-metal detour ("Leffotrack"), the record never again reaches the heights of the opening track, "Serving Him", or "Rubedo", powerful and largely successful songs, but fairly predictable, unable to surprise the way the band has elsewhere. Overall, though, Close is an ambitious, powerful album that doesn't quite manage to bring all its ideas into full focus, suggesting there's still room for the Veneto band to improve.

The tour that follows cements Messa's career on stage, and Live At Roadburn (2023) is a brief record of it (just four tracks).

Three years on, Messa return - now anticipated like true genre heavyweights - with the new LP The Spin. Some expected it to be their game-changing record, but it's actually more of an album of confirmation and consolidation, with tight, decisive songs that give the impression of a band confident in itself and able to use its craft to its advantage to shore up any moments of uncertainty. The key difference seems to be, above all, a smaller dose of the influences that had cropped up before, from the psychedelic endings of Belfry ("Blood") to the folk intrusions of Close ("Orphalese").

Two tracks above all elevate them to the front rank of doom - international doom, we can say by now (as confirmed by their signing to Metal Blade Records). The first is the single "The Dress", which kicks off straight away with a monolithic riff, by this point in what we could call Alberto Piccolo's recognizable style, with Sara Bianchin's usual magnificent vocals, a guitar interlude with a desert-rock sound vaguely reminiscent of Carpenter, then the entrance of a trumpet and a jazz guitar leading to a finale with a dizzying crescendo. These are things Messa had already done in previous years, but now they consolidate their experience, managing to craft a track in perfect balance.

A track like "Immolation", on the other hand, is something new, with an intro of vocals and piano almost in a black-music vein that explodes around the halfway point into a truly remarkable doom apotheosis. Aside from that, there are no weak moments: the first single "At The Races" or "Fire On The Roof", with its electronic backbone, are typical examples of Messa's sound.

The final eight minutes of "Thicker Blood" shouldn't go unnoticed either - perhaps a plunge into the record's deepest depths, with one of the most adventurous guitar finales Alberto Piccolo has ever conceived.

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