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Man, this disc was really not what I expected when I saw the cover art. Post Mortem are a New England Thrash band from the old days – this is their fourth album in a career dating back to 1984 – and the band has always seemingly had a goofy kind of image. With the third-grade cover art and the song titles like "Crispy Monsters" and "Field Trip" I was pretty much braced for Anthrax-styled silliness and bad Punk/Thrash riffs.

Which is not at all what is on here. Contrary to everything it appears to be, Message From the Dead is a slow-crawling, malevolent, dirge-like album with a lot of similarity to shit like Celtic Frost – hell, the guitar sound is straight out of To Mega Therion. Big, slow riffs with that fat, analog guitar tone topped off by guest vocals from like five different guys. Former vocalist John McCarthy apparently died just before he was scheduled to record the vocal tracks, and so a slew of friends were recruited to fill in for him and finish the disc. Maybe his death is what ended up making this such a bleak, harsh album. I don't know, I have never heard their old stuff. But this is a bitter, angry album that has a lot more to do with proto-Black Metal like early Sodom or Hellhammer than the pop-punk nonsense the cover makes it look like. This is a seriously badass album that a lot of people will probably skip because of what they expect it to sound like, when really you could package this in a black cover with a monochrome skull, print all the titles in Norwegian, and people would think it was a Black Metal masterwork. Worth a look.