Sentenced to Life - Black Breath

Holy shit it’s a band you’ve probably never heard of. Don’t worry though, this is only their second release. I’ve actually been following Black Breath since I first picked up their debut EP Razor to Oblivion. It instantly blew me away and while I usually don’t go for underground bands I decided to follow them. Their debut album Heavy Breathing was one of the best pieces of new metal that I’ve seen in a long time so I was pretty excited to see what this album had to offer.

Now most bands can pretty easily fit into a category. Slayer is thrash, Mayhem is black metal, Vader is death metal, etc. Some bands are a little more difficult, like Poland’s Behemoth, which are one of the few bands to be described as blackened death metal. Well this band is fucking impossible to categorize. There is so much going on here. The vocals are nothing but pure crust punk. The music has tinges of punk but is mostly a wild mix of old school death metal, thrash metal, crossover thrash, and doom metal. The best description I can really come up with is crossover-thrash-death-doom-crust, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Submissions of possible genres are greatly appreciated.

This album basically picks up where its predecessor left off. Same people, same studio, same producer (Kurt Ballou of the metalcore band Converge does another amazing job). This album however is shorter than it’s predecessor, clocking in at just over half an hour. The longest song here is actually just over five minutes. This means that most songs are short bursts of pure anger, angst, and all the evil that this band can pack in.

The opening track “Feast Of The Damned” does a quick fade in and then gets right into the music. The vocals are really punky here. Something that your bound to notice is the double bass drumming, it appears on just about every song. I’m always torn about double bass since sometimes it just sounds like its throwing off the tempo but the drumming here is immaculate. It seamlessly shifts from double bass to drum roll to pounding to machine gun, all in a fifteen second span.

This album seriously gets going on the title track. The song has a really great riff and a chorus that was made for singing along to. The buzzawing guitars here are really great but at no point do they drown out anything else. They are always crisp and clear.

This is a really excellent album. I’m glad to see that Black Breath hasn’t fallen into the sophomore slump. This band seems to be quickly rising in the metal community, they recently played Austin’s SXSW and were nominated for Metal Hammer’s Golden God award for best underground band. This is one of the best releases of this still new year and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Sentenced to Life

The Flame

Feast Of The Damned