Remember the 80’s metal era, the days of just straight ahead metal awesomeness? Those 80’s bands that filled a arena with powerful songs, anthemic monsters of rock songs that you sang with gusto with as much energy as the band was playing with. Well this for me is Messenger. Place them with any of those 80’s metal / arena rock bands that we all know, whether Judas Priest, Whitesnake, Dokken, early Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden, do I need to name more…? Well they are a nice fit for that era. They embody many of the elements of those 80’s greats, yet still hold themselves with a distinctive enough modern and fresh sound not to be a brief fry in the pan band in my opinion, or just another copy of….

The reality is as hair metal goes, a lot of the bands rest on the laurels of the greats of that era, and it seeps through the music of the bands almost always, leaving a distinctive old flavor, no matter how modern they try and sound. Messenger seems to break through those elements and bring an EP, which manages to bring the 80’s metal sound to the future without coming out as a regurgitated assembly of past bands. As familiar as they sound, they have a certain distinctiveness, which rumbles with an individualistic interpretation.  Messenger started out as a vision of a way to share the gospel of Jesus Christ through rock music. For them the message is not just in their music, but there lifestyles too. Continue reading »