After a few days of listening to soft, female-fronted neofolk, Canada's Chainbreaker gave me a welcome taste of the exact opposite, being raunchy leather-and-spikes thrash by people who sound like they spent all their formative years listening to Venom. In fact, the members have more experience than their laser-like focus on dirty punk-thrash lets on; the band features members of Cauldron and (formerly) Toxic Holocaust. If one likes a steady diet of Venom worship, Lethal Desire delivers the sleaze with high quality and plenty of ferocity.

For a band formed ad-hoc "as an excuse to cope with winter by getting hammered and playing Razor songs", the tracks contain some excellent thrash moments. The tracks' heavy d-beat backing drives them like a stake through the heart; Constant Graving, the first song they wrote, is a little too deliberate for my tastes, but it's still decent; Hellbound and Leatherized correspond more to pure crossover thrash, while the drug-abuse ode Methalina has more of a hard rock chorus. Chainbreaker has the habit of bringing in the bombastic intro chords that the old Bay Area thrashers used to do; why did that fall out of fashion when it sounded so great? And there's some lead soloing, particularly on The List, keeping things interesting.

Rob Ouellette's vocals work perfectly here, gritty and dirty without going all the way to the extremes that, say, Midnight's Athenar would; his delivery is crisper and less slurred. They are matched by the guitar tones, a grinding roar that dominates the mix. Lethal Desire doesn't do anything new; formed as a lark, the band focuses on the sound that their label's audience craves, and the topics, too: Sex, violence, drugs, and Satan. But one has to admit that they do it marvellously well.

Bandcamp: https://chainbreaker-canada.bandcamp.com/album/lethal-desire.