Sara: Vocals
Marco: Guitar / Bass
Alberto: Guitar
Rocco: Drums
Sailing past their tenth anniversary in 2024, Italian doom artisans Messa take another step towards legendary status with their majestic fourth album The Spin, inviting the listener on a breathtaking journey across the wide open skies of their creative imagination, over a beautiful landscape of moods, twists and styles. From a basis in the band’s eclectic, self-defined ‘Scarlet Doom‘ sound, The Spin rises and falls, broods and bites, comforts and destroys, while resounding with both instinctive, compulsive magic and obsessive, concerted hard work. After lighting up the underground with a triptych of increasingly distinctive and wondrous records – 2016′s Belfry, 2018′s Feast For Water and 2022′s Close – Messa are audibly equipped for the big leagues, and with the help of Metal Blade Records, The Spin should ensure they attain them.
Palpably assembled with love and care, Messa‘s heightened craftsmanship rings loud from the album’s elegant architecture. Written over six weeks of intensive daily sessions, in a 500-year-old villa close to the quartet’s beautiful hometown of Bassano Del Grappa (VI) in Northern Italy, Messa applied scrupulously high standards to the process, even while challenging themselves to change the way they work. “When we recorded Close back in 2021, we wanted to be all in the same room together,” explains the band. “This time we decided to do the exact opposite. We recorded the album in three different locations and timings. This record has seen a lot of rearrangement of the same musical material in order to make a coherent work from start to finish. We also aimed at making the songs work with the most minimal structure while trying not to repeat ourselves too much. We applied a simple rule: if you hear the same thing twice it’s enough. Three times? It gets boring.“
Messa‘s range has always been a factor in their promise; their ‘Scarlet Doom‘ signature sound absorbs influences from jazz and blues, punk and prog, black metal and dark ambient, but their restless experimentalism has extraordinarily smooth and assured results. The Spin incorporates another new element, interpolating an 80s gothic rock vibe in typically full-blooded fashion. “We don’t like to repeat ourselves and we constantly try to find a new language to express – while keeping our identity,” stresses the band. “This time we delved into a territory we had never explored before, which is the decade of the 1980s. We are aware that many bands before us took inspiration from that era, but we decided to be careless and get away with it. Mainly because we get involved and question what we do. We are not part of the ‘dark scene’ anyway. The influence for this record looks back to the early goth rock/dark wave rather than the later emanations of the genre.” In addition to Sisters Of Mercy and Virgin Prunes, the band cites records by Killing Joke, Mercyful Fate, Jimmy Page, Journey, The Sound, Boy Harsher and Vangelis as impacting significantly upon the creation of The Spin.
Having set their new course, Messa once again embraced the thorough attention to detail that has marked their work thus far, reducing average song lengths to contain everything on two sides of vinyl. “Once we understood that we wanted the album to be our own take on the 1980s musical heritage, we delved into a really intense arranging process,” affirms the band. “Rocco tried to streamline his drum parts as much as possible, in order to give kick and snare the maximum impact. Gated reverb was a central choice in the drums’ sound. Alberto and Marco did their best to incorporate their instruments with the synthesizers, dividing their work between string and synth. There’s a blend of the two techniques in the record.“
To achieve the authentic sound that Messa had in mind, they set about assembling as much original 80s equipment as they could get their hands on – “from the drums and the amps to the actual mixing console, chorus effects, gated reverbs, and of course pianos and synths from the era like the CP80 and the Juno 106.” For Messa, this isn’t just about dabbling with new sounds for shits and giggles; expanding their sonic horizons and incorporating new musical and technical elements are matters of existential importance. “The first ones we try to surprise are ourselves,” states the band. “Sounds weird, but we push really hard to get out of our comfort zone and become better musicians, composers and performers. There’s always got to be something that you’ve never tried before. It gets harder and harder every time.“
Something that seems to get both easier and harder at the same time are Sara’s remarkable vocals. With greater experience of stage and studio, her beguiling pipes continue getting stronger and more versatile; so the singing here is more assertive and confident, but the singer’s concerted push to new heights comes somewhat at the expense of a healthy mental equilibrium. “For this record I gave up parts of my own sanity,” reveals Sara. “I wore myself in so many different ways… You can’t lie when you’re singing. My aim was to record my parts in the most honest way possible. Mix-wise, the vocals are more on the spotlight, in true 80s fashion. The lyrics touch on multiple topics throughout the record; destroying one’s ego, impossible cursed love, giving up on yourself, others’ expectations, self-sabotage, resurrection. While we were touring the US I reread some books by Cormac McCarthy. It was crucial to pave the way I wanted to express myself. I think the lyrics this time are more ‘straight in your face’. I used metaphors like I always did, but I wanted to get more verbally naked and raw. I never spoke so clearly in our previous records about insecurity, misery, uneasiness, anguish and distress.“
Messa‘s four-piece line-up has now remained a constant for over ten years. How do the bandmates assess their development after the milestone of their first decade together? “Sometimes we clash, of course,” the band reason. “But we have a very strong bond, and we are friends before being colleagues. Every madness made this bond even stronger. Communication is key, as much as sharing a vision. This force makes you go through every barrier. We are still tight knit, after all these years. If we look back at when we started as a band, we consider ourselves completely different individuals. So many things happened in ten years, both in our personal life and band experience. A car crash, hundreds of shows, broken vans, four records, romantic relationships that went down the drain… But we still got something to say, for sure.”
