Breathless – Thrashumancy

As a writer I should be able to literally pour my heart and soul into anything I write, correct? It’s true but when something comes along that you really enjoy but you can’t put your finger on why you like it so much, it’s sort of hard to write what you feel. Certain records over the years have made me feel this year and a couple that I’m trying to review right now are doing it to me. One of them records is Breathless’s “Thrashumancy”, the debut full-length from this Spanish thrash four piece has rubbed me in as many ways a record can, to be honest. As we all know, I love my metal, I live for my metal but thrash has never been my favorite of the genres. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy thrash quite a bit but it’s just one of those genres that is beyond difficult to stamp your emotions on how I feel when I listen to a record.

With that being said, “Thrashumancy” is one of those records that I was enjoying more than I should of when I first started my first spin. The more I listened to it, the more I caught myself feeling like I wanted to stop it and put on something else. Not because it’s a bad record, it’s just that the majority of the songs sound the same.. I know, you could sit here and tell me that all doom/crust/black records sound the same because you can tell the difference between the tracks but in this case, they really do just mash together. I’m not taking anything away from the band, they play some really good thrash with massive bass lines, and some solos that ripped right through my heart, in a good way. The drum patters are in the classic thrash family while the vocals are pretty killer but still in that thrash family of things. The few tracks that stood out to me were “Anoxia”, “Storming For Vengeance” & an instrumental track titled “Ramiro Has A Gun”.

Maybe it’s just me but when I put on a thrash record, all my mind thinks about is nuclear waste, death, populated areas getting destroyed from air raids and skeletons. Don’t even try to ask me why my mind thinks this but it could be because all the thrash records these days seem to have that type of landscapes on them. “Anoxia”, the sixth track on the record is my favorite, the drum roll at the beginning is killer and the build/solo around the one minute an thirty second mark is something that will have you wishing you were part of a skeleton, nuclear waste type holocaust. “Thrashumancy” is far from the worst record I’ve heard but it isn’t the best, in my opinion.

Thrash lovers might say that the production needs to be a little more rough and raw, just so you know, the production on this record is very, very clean so if you hate polished records, stay away from this one. Also, in past reviews I’ve talked about rain and thunder for an intro, well, Breathless must of heard me because the intro to this record is amazing. Forty-eight seconds of rain falling into little puddles as the thunder roars in the background. You can hear jets flying by as sirens go off, it sounds like the band just escaped some form of holding cell and they are out for blood for the next thirty-nine minutes.

The final verdict is that as much as I love thrash and as much as I want to listen to it, it’s beyond a struggle to put my finger on exactly what emotions come out of me when a thrash record is playing. “Thrashumancy” is an overall decent debut full-length but it’s just missing a couple things. The huge thing is that all the tracks have a similar structure and I feel like they could bring something different and original on the next release.

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