Skeletonwitch - 'Breathing The Fire'

Athens, Ohio thrashers continue to thrive and grow.

Skeletonwitch is among the handful of nouveaux thrash bands like Municipal Waste, Toxic Holocaust and Warbringer that pay homage to the genre without sounding stale or redundant. They’ve clearly spent their time writing songs instead of picking out the latest pair of hi-tops, armless jean jackets and posing like the cover of Exodus’ Pleasures of The Flesh.

Their latest album Breathing The Fire will remind you of when you cranked Slayer’s Show No Mercy on the school bus via a Sony Walkman that was the size of your backpack. You remember those times: you sported numerous Ozzy pins on your Dad’s Army jacket; you dodged loogies from the neighborhood jocks and illustrated your Trapper Keeper with inverted crosses. It was those times that you almost wished you were riding the short bus but were sustained by metal.

Breathing The Fire has a huge, prominent guitar sound. Nate Garnette makes effortless transitions from thrash riffs to passages with an almost Norwegian black metal sensibility like “Released From The Catacombs.” The closer “And Into the Flames,” has a vibe reminiscent of blackened South American thrash. The only occasional shortcoming is Chance Garnette’s vocals, which work for most of the songs but periodically sound thin.

This album isn’t a musical crapshoot; it’s more like a gut punch tailor made for metal listeners. It’s short, it’s crisp and it’s catchy. There’s no artsy-fartsy crap. It’s metal that speaks for itself without pretense. Perhaps most importantly it passes the Reign in Blood test. As soon as 30 minutes have passed you want to listen to the album again. Don your old plastic headphones and commence banging.