Exumer – Death Mask Messiah
Exumer – Death Mask Messiah
Metal Blade
Release date: 28/08/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
8/10
David Koresh talked seventy-six people into believing that he was the Messiah, and the result was a fiery explosion. Exumer convinced me that they’re still the less dangerous option for joining a cult.
Frankfurt, 1985. Two guys meet on a train headed to Monsters of Rock. They barely say a word to each other. They catch sight of each other’s leather jackets and give the customary nod of mutual recognition of metalheads before going back to their business. That’s pretty much it. No elaborate origin story. No eureka moment in the rehearsal room. No drunken handshake over a battered Marshall amplifier. Just two Germans on a train looking like they’ve been banned from several nice places.
Forty years later, they’re still around.
Exumer could have spent ten years touring Possessed by Fire until everybody involved ends up with some strange hearing condition brought on by listening to Possessed by Fire every night. Instead, they keep producing albums. Even with the seven-year hiatus, nobody seems to have managed to chill during this time, and Death Mask Messiah is their sixth release.
Forty-two minutes. Eleven tracks. And my fist was clenched by the third song.
This is a far more aggressive Exumer. The guitars are considerably sharpened, the drums are blasting as though someone has been using the recording studio as a demolition site, and Mem V. Stein sounds like he personally has a gripe with the whole electricity network.
Alex Voss and Jerome Reil join the band on bass and drums. The official description says that they have “formidably integrated themselves into the Exumer tapestry,” which is a very fancy way of saying that they showed up, played well, and didn’t get eaten by the senior members.
In thrash metal, that’s a promising start.
They do add some fresh power, though. The rhythm section is nicely powerful, and the album benefits from the impression that these are not just musicians filling some vacancies. There is power in their playing, especially when Mensh and Marc Bräutigam start throwing riffs in there.
Bräutigam joined Exumer in 2013 and finally gets his name on two songs, “Frozen Ground” and “Ravishing Waste”.
Thirteen years to make it through the committee process for two compositions. That’s either amazing patience or the world’s slowest songwriting democracy. I’ll go with patience, but the alternative could easily involve ending the process with somebody buried under a rehearsal room.
Production is in the hands of Dominic Paraskevopoulos, and this is fabulously vicious-sounding. Arthur Rizk does the mixing and mastering and there’s plenty of punch without making this another of those modern metal albums where each drum hit seems to have been computer-verified.
Stein insists that this is “no AI bullshit, no file sharing, it’s real stuff.”
No one asked.
That’s what makes it so funny.
The album has plenty of sweat and abrasion in it. Stein’s voice has changed since the ’80s, but it fits well now. There’s more dirt in it now, fewer of the youthful squeals and more of the accumulated irritation of forty years of observing human nature and finding nothing much to suggest we’ve improved.
Then he went and wrote lyrics about Waco.
David Koresh, 1993, seventy-six people died, including twenty-eight children. Stein has chosen the Branch Davidian siege as the focal point for the album themes of false prophecy, misinformation, and political manipulation. The argument extends into the American political landscape of the past ten years, and clearly he finds it interesting how scared people can be driven into increasingly insane positions by someone offering certainty.
There’s nothing like opening the evening with a song that equates a federal siege to a thrash metal metaphor for democracy.
The title track really hits home. It’s ugly, direct, and appropriately uncomfortable. Koresh becomes the face of all those who have realized that scared people are easier to control than happy ones.
‘Fratricide’ deals with the culture wars, identity politics, and the spectacle of people behaving towards one another like enemies because some talking heads on TV told them they should. It’s like an argument exploding in a group chat while accidentally leaving a blast-beat machine on in the background.
‘Serpent’, ‘Eradication’, and ‘Scorcher’ don’t really bring down the blood pressure.
The good news is that there’s plenty of melody hiding behind the ugliness. Exumer hasn’t forgotten the importance of riffs. You can walk away from this album remembering bits and pieces of songs and not just that you have endured something loud.
‘Unchained Angel’ is acover, and Nasty Ronnie from Nasty Savage joins in to sing his own band’s song. His stage name is one of the rare cases of branding that doesn’t require any further explanation. Exumer supported Nasty Savage on their first European tour in 1988, and this is their chance to repay a debt after thirty-eight years.
Metal has better memories than most marriages.
There’s a dip in the middle. The album gets locked into its own aggression at times. You can admire the commitment while wishing that somebody would open a window.
Then you remember what they’re singing about.
Maybe the claustrophobic atmosphere is appropriate.
Stein is calling Death Mask Messiah a “second spring”, a new beginning, something hopeful and rejecting nihilism. It’s quite a statement coming from the man who spent the better part of this album screaming about Waco, political manipulation, social division and the idea that large numbers of grown-ups have completely lost their minds.
It’s quite sweet.
The point is, you can hear that sincerity in it. Exumer still believe that music can mean something to someone. Stein wants even a single person in the crowd to feel less alone, and the album makes more sense when listening to it through this perspective. It’s angry because he cares. It’s a considerably harder feeling to fake than anger for its own sake.
And it’s always nice to see an old thrash band not turn itself into a historical exhibit.
They’ve got the history, but they don’t want to live inside it.
Death Mask Messiah is the album where Exumer takes a look at the state of the world and decided that writing another album is the better option than silently screaming at the TV.
Track list
- Death Mask Messiah
- Blinding Skies
- Sin Bleeder
- Eradication
- Ravishing Waste
- Allocated Savagery
- Serpent
- Fratricide
- Scorcher
- Frozen Ground
- Unchained Angel
Links
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/exumer/503593192
https://exumerofficial.bandcamp.com/album/death-mask-messiah
https://www.facebook.com/exumerofficial
https://www.instagram.com/exumerofficialDisclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
