Skeletonwitch

After five years of plugging their particular take on the blackened thrash metal genre, Ohio's Skeletonwitch finally nail down the wretched attack they've been striving for: cryptic heaviness that channels the aggression of black metal and slams it against the dynamic pace of thrash with gritty, albeit compelling, results. In the case of Breathing The Fire, this union of Carcass's thunderous trade-offs between guttural bellows and throat-tearing tenor grind with the straightforward drive of Motörhead ― if they were a grindcore band, as opposed to balls-out rockers ― has the same overall atmosphere acts such as Satyricon have been performing as of late. That would be rockin' death metal/grindcore that elicits some sort of metre and foot-tapping, as opposed to the typical hyperactive blathering that dominates the scene. No less aggressive than the bleakest element of their black metal influences and full of bulldozing riffs, Breathing The Fire is a wonderfully sick merger of brutality and belligerence.