Memory keeper. Mostly music and movies, plus some series and video games. Obscure darkness meets pop culture glow.
Atmospheric dark ambient. It’s like a movie soundtrack and spans a wide range: creepy, eerie, wondering, whimsical. Makes my imagination run rampant.
I’m currently preparing to GM a Mörk Borg adventure and this is an amazing soundtrack to that setting. It’s dark enough to fit the grim world, but also has so much more layers than just the usual doom metal soundtrack that the canon usually suggests, makes the game atmosphere more versatile.
This is definitely the best electro album I’ve heard in a long while. Amazing sound. Definitely stands on the shoulders of giants that came before, but sounds current and of very high quality. And I love that with today’s standards it can be considered long, so there’s an hour’s worth of material to listen to.
Soothing glitchy ambient. Mostly with autotune vocals (amazingly I find it comforting here, while I usually hate it), sometimes with bits of chiptune sounds.
Ambient, dub techno, IDM.
I find it surprising to see “drum and bass” as the main call sign for this music on its Bandcamp page (based on self-tagging and quoted reviews). I would have never used that genre here. If I’m looking for one word in that area then rather dubstep, or I’d rather say broken beat rhythmic noise with a techno aesthetic. Although, maybe the latter is just one way to elaborate what dubstep is.
This is an amazingly good ambient record. I haven’t been so enthusiastic about a piece of ambient release for a long time. Maybe it’s because in the age of “everyone’s a musician” and “AI generated shit”, it’s so easy to flood the web with cheap drones and low tempo loops and slap ambient on it. Then something like the Etna Sessions, the HYbr:ID series, or this album comes along, and there’s no explanations needed, I instantly feel the difference a real artist and craftsman of ambient music makes.
Liquid drum and bass. This music and this album cover is an exceptionally strong mood.
Something something.
It’s the breakbeat I love and remember done now, with some big beat, drum and bass, and video game sound aesthetics. This is such a fun album from the music through the concept to the cover art.
Cute and calm acoustic album. Kinda jazz, very light rock, pop.
It’s dark like gothic but not black metal or post-punk goth, it’s well-crafted musically but not over the top progressive metal, it’s slow in tempo but not at all doom or sludge. I was a bit confused when they listed things like jazz and dark ambient in their influences, and then, the track The Dress goes into a full-on jazz depart before jumping into a cinematic transition and ending up with a fantastic solo and then the crystal clear vocals arrive… They really have it all. Still, it’s not a mish-mash of things but a perfect amalgamation and genre-bending.
Overall, Messa is just one of those most eclectic dark rock bands that put the sweetest sorrow in my throat. And The Spin is a beautiful album, gives me shivers over and over again. I can easily listen to this on repeat.
Update: I’ve just listened to the previous albums of Messa and now it’s clear why they mention stuff like drone, dark ambient, doom, or stoner as references for their music. There are actual full tracks with these aesthetics on earlier records. However, I think The Spin is a lot more evolved and cleaner version of their sound. It’s not so much all these styles living side-by-side anymore but having a great blend of these sources into one coherent voice.