Black Breath - Heavy Breathing

[Dann O)))]

I almost made a thread about this album yesterday....

killer shit.

[Vagectomy]

HELL NO!

[ErikTeethoftheDivine]

Awesome album. So much better than the EP.

[Assplay!!!]

Awesome album. So much better than the EP.

I like the EP better.
That said... it's a ripper for sure. Way more Entombed love on this one.

[Mooretician]

HAY-UW YAY-UH E-HAIM. Shit RULES.

[The Torsion]

Would like this band if vocalist sounded older than twelve.

[Vagectomy]

Would like this band if vocalist sounded older than twelve.

He's 11 so it won't be long!

[The Torsion]

I'm not trying to troll, though. I like the riffs, and Entombed/Dismember worship is the best thing in the world, but vocals are more important to me than to some others, and you have to at least sound as burly as LG, or preferrably Nicke Andersson on Clandestine or Matti Karki.

[Vagectomy]

I'm not trying to troll, though. I like the riffs, and Entombed/Dismember worship is the best thing in the world, but vocals are more important to me than to some others, and you have to at least sound as burly as LG, or preferrably Nicke Andersson on Clandestine or Matti Karki.

I know exactly what you are saying. Vocals are very important and can make or break a band for me. I'll stick to early Entombed and Dismember though.

[Hectorputrid]

HELLL YERR.

[Wormholegenerator]

[neckbeard]

vocals on the ep sound fine to me. haven't heard this yet.

[Mendicant]

played this in the car on the way to work and had a grin on my face the whole time - awesome Swedeath worship and much better than I remember the ep - keen as a bean to see them at MDF

Hell Yeah!

[Jack Mort]

Whats with all these newer bands starting to worship the sunlight studios sound? Trap Them, Nails, and these guys. I love the sound, i just think it's interesting. They killed live.

[The Torsion]

vocals on the ep sound fine to me. haven't heard this yet.

They sound like screamy snotty kid hardcore vocals.

[Bored, Esq.]

Whats with all these newer bands starting to worship the sunlight studios sound?

There are tons of them now and they pulled a lot of the old groups back into rehearsing. I guess it's just another part of the whole "retro" thing.

[The Torsion]

snotty screamy? I hear more of a NY hardcore influence on vocals but hEy WHATEVA

Yeah, slightly nasally, not that deep at mid-range. Compare the vocals to Nicke Andersson's on Clandestine, Matti Karki singing for Dismember, there's a huge difference. Again, I don't like nasally punky vocals, most of you guys fucking love them.

[eyehatethehumanrace]

is this stuff comparable to Bastard Priest?

[Introvert]

They killed live.

When they played at The Know?? That was a fun night! And they kicked ass!

[John Jr.]

when i hear this title, all i can think of is Budgie.......

[delmuerte]

Album is good. Liked the EP way more. Kinda bummed this isn't quite as rockin' as the EP.

[Jack Mort]

They killed live.

When they played at The Know?? That was a fun night! And they kicked ass!

Hell yeah dude!

[12 Months of Mao]

Love the Danzig worship of 'Unholy Virgin.' 'Virus' is a ripper as well. I'll have to go back and check out the ep now, passed it by in the past because these guys were kind of meh when I saw them open up for Victims last year. Interested in seeing them again in Baltimore and deciding whether or not Kurt Ballou is to blame for how much I like this album.

As for the snotty vocals, definitely see what Torsion is talking about, but they remind me of a young Jerry A. So I'm cool with that.

[FATRABBIT]

fucking irish, pissing in everyone's beer

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

I’m just gonna say it straight out, right now - it’s genuinely worrying to me that a band this completely bereft of any kind of spark or originality can end up on a label as supposedly pioneering and influential as Southern Lord.

To call this band generic would be an understatement. Worryingly, this seems to be the first in what looks like an emerging pattern of forthcoming metallic hardcore records out on SL soon (along with albums by Italian crapmongers The Secret and enjoyable-but-mediocre crusties Masakari, and a 12″ by Trap Them) that suggests the label are inexplicably making a muddled attempt to clamber on to the metal/hardcore crossover bandwagon before it leaves town for once and for all.

They’d do well to stop right now if this is what they regard as being a quality band in the genre.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I don’t believe originality is a pre-requisite for music being good, and I have a shelf full of amazing grindcore records in my house that all essentially sound the same which proves that.

But, when a band choose to open an album with a song which revolves around a riff blatantly cut and pasted from another tune , and that stolen riff is the only memorable one on the record, it’s a very bad sign.

And this is exactly the case here - the pilfered riff from Razor’s “Hypertension” that Black Breath used throughout opener “Black Sin (Spit on the Cross)” lingers more in the memory on completing a listen than anything the band themselves can muster.

Sure, thousands of bands have lifted well known riffs in their own material both intentionally and unintentionally over the years, but something this shameless can only be pulled off if the rest of your material is up to scratch. And believe me, nothing here is.

Here’s the thing - I don’t know what to make of Black Breath. Part of me wonders if they’re a piss take, like some kind of Death Metal version of Steel Panther. Part of me thinks they’re just a surprisingly average band who got incredibly lucky.

But part of me also suspects there’s an element of calculation that’s gone into this band - it stinks (no pun intended) of manufactured nostalgia, of appealing to a very specific stereotype - all tongue in cheek blasphemous lyrics (come on - calling a song “Unholy Virgin” in 2010 is probably even embarassing to the bedrom dwelling Kvlt Elite at this point) and fist in the air cymbal stabs.

They’re appealing to your inner caveman to open a beer and party down. And that’s pretty much the extent of their power.

This album is really less of a series of songs and more of a patchwork quilt of other people’s ideas, reassembled in what I presume was a “loving homage” to their influences, but comes off more as a pastiche, or downright mockery.

Ultimately, what Black Breath peddle for the most part is a mixture of Dismember inspired death metal and a more polished take on d-beat hardcore that seems like it would primarily appeal to people who would perhaps be only casual listeners of both genres. It strips both these two sounds of the fury that drives them, leaving only the guitar sound and the tempo.

Elements of old school thrash metal also appear from time to time, just to make sure they don’t miss that particular demographic too. There’s no passion to be heard here. No atmosphere. No real power. It’s all logic. It’s all theft. It’s not that they’re not doing anything new with their influences, it’s that they’re doing absolutely nothing at allwith them.

This album feels so completely manufactured and soulless that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear Simon Cowell had put the band together as an experiment in reaching into the pockets of the metal/punk community.

I realise that as genres both punk rock and heavy metal aren’t often about anything other than loud guitars and rocking out, but seriously, in 20 or so years of listening to the kind of death metal and hardcore punk this band are drawing from, this record is one of the most shocking examples I’ve encountered recently of music built on the absolute lowest common denominator.

I can understand how these songs were built to be played live to an audience of clearly inebriated people (though a friend who saw them live last year described them to me as being -and I quote - “woeful” in that arena too), with their clearly linear “this is the intro, this is the sing along part, this is the breakdown” structure, but seriously, this is just piss weak retro nonsense. If it was beer, you wouldn’t drink it even if you were really desperate to get hammered.

What absolutely kills me about this band though, the final insult, is that I know in my heart that they’re going to be fucking huge.

http://www.metalireland.com/2010/04/01/ ... hern-lord/

[12 Months of Mao]

"it’s genuinely worrying to me that a band this completely bereft of any kind of spark or originality can end up on a label as supposedly pioneering and influential as Southern Lord."

Stopped right there.