For Heavy Breathing, Black Breath’s debut album, the Seattle quintet travelled to Godcity Studio in Massachusetts, workshop of the Converge kingpin Kurt Ballou, to try and inject some real menace into their hardcore. The result is a coming together of the most vitriolic punk and the blackest of metals; enough to send even the meanest looking two-stepper diving for cover. Coming from a band that’s toured with acts as diverse as The Accused, Nachmystium and Book Of Black Earth it’s no surprise that some of that pungent evil has rubbed off.Whilst tracks like ‘Black Sin’, ‘Virus’ and ‘Fallen’ butcher together thickly skidding shreds, dirty chugs and butane-spitting exhortations to graft an immense hardcore groove across our foreheads, amongst these instruments of torture lurks a bitter metal, downtempo overdrive. It's an affectation that appears at length, as on the wheezing instrumental title-track, or pops up suddenly to provide burn and dirge openings to tracks like ‘Eat The Witch’ or ‘Wewhocannotbenamed’. Here is a tag-team of styles that first offers an embittered warning and then flicks the switch to a wrathful attack as great hulking boots come stamping down onto our already shattered eardrums.There's much that is rough around the edges but they are faults that undoubtedly Black Breath were looking for when they started out on this journey - I bet there wasn't a clean surface left at Godcity once this lot had finished with it. For instance, ‘Escape The Death’, although displaying plenty of minor-key portent, gurgles and drools interminably until it finally licks its chops clean of slobber on the struts of the breakdown; and, ‘Unholy Virgin’ is a track you‘ll either love or hate, being confusingly both a tip of the hat to Entombed and a two-fingered salute to Motorhead at the same time. But if you need a bit of a bastard to shake up your music collection, you won’t find a nastier one than this nasty piece of work from Black Breath.