Messa – Live at Roadburn
Release Date: 7th April 2023
Label: Svart Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Doom Metal, Ambient, Drone, Occult Rock, Heavy Metal, Stoner Rock, Folk Metal.
FFO: 40 Watt Sun, Darkher, Windhand, Witch Mountain, Pallbearer, Kovent.
Review By: Joe McKenna
For some time now, Italian doom architects Messa have been bestowing their unique and mystical sound amongst a range of audiences worldwide. The band’s well-crafted, enraging, and powerfully enriching rendition of doom, occult, and drone metal has pushed the sonic boundaries for doom, encapsulating a world of beauty, sorrow, and damnation through intense, droning rhythms and enchanting sonic textures. Messa’s extraordinary live performances are often captivating and experimentally leaning, therefore, the band’s 2022 performance at Roadburn had to be something above this calibre. The Netherlands based festival has long been home to some of metal, hardcore, ambient, stoner and noise rock music’s more avant-garde subsidiaries and so the Italian doomers had to conceive something special, and as a result they presented an enthusiastic crowd to selected cuts from their acclaimed 2022 album CLOSE in an alluring and almost hypnotic fashion.
The band were certain to create a uniquely transcendent experience with this performance as they opened with the song Suspended, also the opening track from the original record, the primary objective being to send their audience into a spiritual frenzy, taking them out of their bodies and enthralling them with mystical drones to fill the silence whilst Sara’s vocals imbue some harmonic distance between herself and the overly anticipated crowd. Instrumentally, the slow, heavy riffs and matching percussive elements drive the doom-laden maelstrom of brooding intensity for moments before adding some exotic Mediterranean influences through harmonious guitar melodies and mysterious textural atmospheres. These Mediterranean influences are more apparent as the concert continues, performing the record’s third track next, Orphalese, this opens with a wild saxophone solo producing a spell-binding Eastern sonic atmosphere that is soon joined by the guitars ready to meld these exotic melodies with crushing doom riffs.
Next the band perform the seventh track from their 2022 album 0=2, by this point it seems like they’ve got total sonic control of their audience, and they utilise this to their advantage by unleashing a hallucinatory drone that swiftly channels the concert venue and transpires back to this folk-inspired Mediterranean atmosphere. There is a substantial use of folk instrumentation that also appears to be absorbed into the band’s sonic palette, with some intricacy, including an oud and duduk being incorporated for that Eastern affect; a mandolin accompaniment to contrast with the distorted rhythmic guitar movements; and a freely improvised sax solo if things weren’t already wild enough. The final song in this recorded performance is Pilgrim, a dramatic and imaginative song that rounds off the show in the most suitable way possible. A slow, climatic build up can be felt through ambient instrumental work and enriching vocals that drift into heavier territory as they continue. You can really begin to encompass the absorbing rhythms and weighty textures when listening here and feel the same way many of the audience members would have been feeling, which shows truly how captivating the performance must have been with only those present to truly understand how that must have felt.
As far as live albums go, this is probably one that will require you to do a lot of digging to end up discovering and possibly even doing a little side-listening of the band’s prior discography to get an authentic idea of what the Italian experimental doomers are all about. That being said, Messa have proved through an honest, authenticated, and captivating way that they are as versatile as they come; both within their sound and performance they are focussed on delivering a live performance more as a transcendental sonic experience rather than a ready-baked set promoting their latest release, and the use of exotic instrumentation, hypnotic textures, hard-hitting riffs, and immense drones resonates with this intention in a clear and consistent manner. 
(4 / 5)
