SKOL

The final Faithful Breath album before they changed their name to Risk and music style to speed metal. The Risk albums is far better than the metal albums they released under the Faithful Breath name, btw.

But we return to this album named Skol. Is it named after this famous beer brand ? A cheap beer with dubious contents. Is it sold here in the UK anylonger ? I do not know. I never buy beer any longer due to a more healthy lifestyle.

To the music........ Faithful Breath has slightly changed style again from their previous Accept copycat album. Accept was a much more aggressive German heavy metal band than Faithful Breath has morphed into on this album. The music on Skol is much more traditional German metal, although still with a lot of very obvious Accept connotations. Accept-Light, I would brand this album.

The lyrics is as usual laughable bad. Nothing has changed there. Unfortunate they are so much in the front of the mix that it is impossible not to notice every single word. Which frankly is painful for the listener. Or if you like, a hilarious experience. The music is so standard heavy metal and so low on quality that this album becomes an involuntary hilarious album. The band has copied other bands in everything and there is hardly any fibre of origiality on this album. No wonder that I as an avid metal fan at that time did not know about this band at all. They were simply never good enough to get noticed.

In short; this is another abysmal bad album from a band which tried their best, but fell short by many country miles. Thankfully, the story has a happy ending with the success Risk got.

Avoid unless you have a weird sense of humour.

1 star

'Skol' - Faithful Breath (3/10)

Faithful Breath is a German band that put out a progressive rock record in the early 70's, and just as quickly, changed their sound into something else entirely. Fast forward a decade or so, and the band is barely recognizable from what they used to be. While its established that many surviving prog rock bands from the 70's changed their sound in order to keep up with the crowds in the 80's, most of those bands became pop outfits, whereas Faithful Breath went down the route of heavy metal. While this would tend to be a more personally promising prospect than hearing a prog band dumb down their sound to the four chord wonder, my first experience with the band's heavy metal material 'Gold n' Glory' indicated to me that there was not all too much to be excited about here. 'Skol' was released the year following 'Gold n' Glory', and right before they decided to change their name and start fresh as the speed metal act Risk. 'Skol' is a weak album from the proggers-turned- hard rockers, and virtually drowned in dated 80's hair appeal. While I still can't call Faithful Breath's material 'horrible', this is a clear step down from the comparatively fun 'Gold n' Glory'.

While I still was not a big fan of Faithful Breath on 'Gold n' Glory', I could enjoy it at least as fun, concise heavy metal; an obscure album that was all too lost in its era. 'Skol' changes their sound up a bit, but for the worse; the songs here sound like they have been taken down a notch in terms of speed and relative heaviness. Instead of a purely heavy metal album, this has now dipped beneath the threshold, into hard rock. The songs are more mid-tempo, there is less excess with the solos, and most things seem to have been toned down, if only a little bit. In any case, this is enough to make 'Skol' a weaker incarnation of Faithful Breath than its predecessor. The lyrics here are laughable, and the songwriting is extremely formulaic, relying mostly on the repetition of the usually gang-chanted choruses, wherein the band usually calls out the title of the song. Sound pretty familiar?

The band's performance here is not memorable, although its not bad at all, for what it is. However, the lacking sense of identity on 'Skol' does nothing for me, and Faithful Breath would remain a lacking Accept clone to the very end. Luckily, their music under the new name of Risk would be better.