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Massed metal

RIDING THE LINE: OLW’s tech-thrash crossover led to bands like Shadows Fall and Killswitch Engage.

This month, we get a crash course in Only Living Witness. As part of its 15-years-in-the-business celebration, Century Media is reissuing the two Only Living Witness albums — 1993’s Prone Mortal Form and 1996’s Innocents — as a single two-CD set, remastered and repackaged. And New England metal kings Shadows Fall, Century Media’s showcase act, are covering “December” on their new Fallout from the War. “Oh!” exclaims SF singer Brian Fair when asked why the band chose that song. “Just — dude! It’s such a sick, heavy riff! What a way to end an album . . . it’s got that very evil vibe, but the vocals are so powerful and melodic. Plus Killswitch Engage always soundchecks with ‘Prone Mortal Form’ — Joel [Stroetzel, KSE guitarist] does his line check with that every single time. So we had to choose another one, heh heh.”

Speaking by phone from the bathroom of Springfield’s Mardi Gras strip bar (“Can you hear the bad techno?”), which happens to be located beneath the Shadows Fall practice space, the effusive Fair is happy to acknowledge his debt to OLW. “The first time I saw Only Living Witness, shit, it must have been ’89 or ’90, at the Channel. I remember at the time being like, ‘Wow, these fucking longhairs are crazy’ — cuz the audience was all skinheads and hardcore kids and these dudes were playing technical thrash. This was before they’d really found their sound. But Boston in those days there was always a lot of fights in the crowd, a lot of division between the metal kids and the hardcore kids or whatever, and Only Living Witness really rode that line. And that early type of crossover was what led to the more modern New England metal bands, like us and Killswitch, not being afraid to take those chances. At the time it was frowned upon by some of the purists. But that’s what purists do. They frown. So it doesn’t matter.”