High Roller Records are celebrating the 10th anniversary of Frank Blackfire’s debut solo album “Back on Fire” with a remastered reissue featuring new artwork and, for the first time, a vinyl edition. To call Frank Blackfire a living legend is no exaggeration. His pioneering guitar work in the early Sodom and Kreator was instrumental in the development of the German thrash metal sound. While he was living in Brazil after the turn of the millennium, he formed the band Mystic and recorded two demos with them, laying the foundation for an album that turned out to be long in coming. “It was a lot of hard work before we released it,” says Blackfire, looking back while he is actually working on a second solo album. The ten tracks of “Back on Fire” – including a thrashy interpretation of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme as an intro and a guest appearance by Sodom frontman Tom Angelripper – are characterised by Frank’s signature guitar style and rasp. With its slew of killer riffs on standouts like ‘Victims of Society’, ‘Warmonger’ and ‘Valley of Suiciders’, the record remains a timeless yet forgotten thrash gem worth (re-)discovering.
