Messiah’s Kiss is about “classic heavy metal – we do what we love and what we definitely do best”. Fantastic, I appreciate the honesty. At least they don’t pretend to do something completely different. Do they actually hope that the music fan that can take similar after similar album without dying of boredom actually exists? Or do they expect to thrive on the newcomers just exploring these territories who did not yet reach their saturation point of Priest/power metal clones? That’s just fine with me. Now we’ve got that cleared up don’t be mad if I won’t rate this higher than a 7,5 max because that’s my limit for not trying to do something new. But a 7,5 it might just be because in fact Messiah’s Kiss goes at it with a certain quality and conviction which ranks them among the better acts in these territories.

Although the title of the album together with the derivative cover should really catapult this act onto the mountain of cheese raised by Manowar and their fellow protagonists, Messiah’s Kiss’ music involves a bit more depth.

Not much, but still. I’d say they’d perfectly fill the spot on your shelves between Judas Priest and the well-known German power metal acts. A fine vocalist, impressive instrumentation and a decent understanding of song writing separates this band from legions of clones and mishaps. The songs are a bit less far-reaching than the work of the aforementioned bands and seem to address mainly the public looking for up-tempo heavy metal of the slick’n’sleezy kind. And I guess they’ll appeal. So if you, like me, are not completely fed up with of this type of music and liked for example Aeronautics of Masterplan, you just might want to give these guys a chance.