Skeletonwitch – Breathing the Fire
Posted on October 13, 2009 at 1:21 pm by admin
I remember the good old days of playing albums in my room when I was having a rough time by myself in my mid-teens. It was some tough stuff that very few other people were into at the time, which really made those albums feel like they were made just for me. That’s the beauty of underground music. Of course, now you can also go to a concert and meet some other people equally as anti-social as part of the underground brotherhood.
On previous efforts, Skeletonwitch were an amalgamation of thrash, melodic death metal and black metal, but this time around the lines seem blurred to where everything is -ish, you know, black metal-ish and so on. There’s more time spent on simplicity on this album, with chord running to drive the point home, much like smacking someone with a hammer, and fewer harmonies and melodies, but when they do some along they’re more noticeable than usual. Between that most obvious action, everything else is as I mentioned before, closely related to black metal, 80’s thrash and melodic death metal, but those moments aren’t quite as obvious, more as through they’ve all been melted together. Topped off is a black metal rasp with death growls for accents every now and then.
The best part however is how Skeletonwitch make their influences sound like pulled everything together from the early and raw albums from their favourite bands and express it all at once. The production here tends to help, and is strangely clear and raw at the same time. Perhaps it the fact that the instruments aren’t tuned to be picture perfect, and it doesn’t have the feeling that the band did hundreds of takes to get the point across, after all, sometimes the most direct emotional point is just a hair sloppy.
Released October 13th, 2009
Skeletonwitch at MySpace
Prosthetic Records at MySpace
Buy this album at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
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