Skeletonwitch - Forever Abomination

The progressive black metal monsters are back, and with more power than ever! I was glad that I heard about this release when I did because I never paid very much attention to this band except for having Breathing in the Fire. But when I saw a post on Metal Injection saying that this was one of the best albums that he had ever heard, I had to give it a listen! And I will tell you, I am so glad that I did, in fact, I just bought a physical copy of the album about two weeks ago. Skeletonwitch has always been known as one of the black metal bands that are ever expanding the black metal genre proving that limits is but a mere myth.

 Skeletonwitch is most known for incorporating thrash metal into their unique black metal sound. But they have also added in many acoustic folk sounds, breakdowns, and even some death metal into their music. In this album, the band chose to drift away from their thrash black sound a little bit to explore new realms of experimentation. One of the genres that they have been adding more of is melodic death; this is most noticeable in the first song and “Shredding Sacred Flesh.”

Now I’m not the most knowledgeable about this band, but I do know the general size of their enormous fan base. After hearing this album, I decided to download their other stuff and was actually kind of disappointed on how low the awesomeness factor was compared to Forever Abomination. One album that Forever Abomination relates very closely to is The Epigenesis by the Greek black metallers Melechesh.

The vocals are really good for black metal, but they won’t really work for anything else if the vocalist tried using his vocals in a different kind of metal band. The drums have a really thick sound that has a lot of bass in the kickdrums, but sounds fairly mediocre concerning the rest of the set. I do feel that the guitars could use to have a different sounding distortion on some of the songs. It kind of bothers me sometimes that bands use same exact guitar distortion on every song on the album, but the distortion differs with each album. I would like to see some variety and experimentation expressed regarding the distortion on the guitars. I also like it when there is some distortion put on the bass guitar, the raw sound of the bass differs depending on what type of bass it is. In this case, I don’t really like the raw sound of the bass, so it could use some buzz.

The sound production of this album is good. This album is by far Skeletonwitch’s best and definitely deserves a good listen, especially for those of you that have not yet been impressed by their older stuff. I’m really looking forward to what they have in store for next time. I would give this album 16/20.