CONFESSOR – Condemned

vote
8.5

• Bands:
  CONFESSOR
• Duration: 00:41:00
• Available from: 01/10/1991
• Label:

• Earache

For Earache, 1991 was a year characterized by releases with a decidedly heterogeneous profile, in which, alongside death metal and grindcore classics such as “Blessed Are The Sick” by Morbid Angel, “Necroticism” by Carcass, “Clandestine” by Entombed or “Warmaster” by Bolt Thrower, there were also more transversal and often difficult to categorize works, such as “Guts Of A Virgin” by Painkiller, “Hate Songs In E Minor” by Fudge Tunnel and the crazy “Lo Flux Tube” by OLD.
In the same period, Cathedral's debut was also released, “The Forest of Equilibrium”, a masterpiece of a genre – doom – which broke the urgency of years spent between the crazy speeds of grind and the claustrophobic sound architectures of death metal. But that won't be the only doom work of 1991, because on October 1st of the same year an album destined to remain a unique in the history of metal.
“Condemned” by the Americans Confessor represents in fact an anomaly never repeated again: a record which, theoretically and historically, is inserted into the doom genre (or rather, as suggested at the time, technical doom), but which ultimately transcends any attempt at cataloguing.

While on the one hand the influence of bands like Trouble is strong – evident above all in the riffs of a song like “Eve of Salvation” – the reason why Confessor are rarely compared to the classics Candlemass or Black Sabbath lies in their intrinsic compositional complexity. The songs are constructed in a brainy and layered way, often approaching Watchtower's intuitions without ever merging into actual thrash metal.
Each track is a complex architecture of angular, sometimes dissonant riffs, which follow drum scores completely free from any standard, arriving in some moments to anticipate the square and epileptic groove of the first Meshuggah. Emblematic in this sense is the labyrinthine “The Stain”, which presents passages that would not look out of place on a record like “Destroy Erase Improve”.
Yet, on many occasions the band does not fail to remind us of their doom roots, diving into the drama of songs like “Suffer”, a sort of 45rpm Solitude Aeternus, or “Prepare Yourself”, in which drums with a dry and very present sound detach themselves from the guitars to venture into disorientating contortions, far from the classic heavy and threatening pace typical of traditional doom metal. An absolute example of this drumming flair is the title track, with an introduction entirely played on polyrhythms.
Singer Scott Jeffreys – who played for a short time in Watchtower in the post-“Control And Resistance” period – also puts on an out-of-the-ordinary performance, all based on very high tones and complex vocal lines, almost Rush-like. Its harmonies, far from immediate, are ideally placed in the wake of records like Deathrow's “Deception Ignored” or Sieges Even's “Life's Cycle”, but with the dramatic emphasis typical of Trouble and Fates Warning.

Fresh from the historic Gods of Grind in 1992, Confessor disbanded before having the chance to record a real sequel, returning only after more than ten years – unfortunately without the guitarist Ivan Colon – with the marvelous “Unraveled” in 2005. However, “Condemned” remains the album with which the band will be remembered: both for the confusion it generated at the time of its release – in the midst of the death metal boom and moreover on a major label of the genre – and for its pure majesty, made up of modern riffs and outside of any scheme for the time, stunning drums and a vocal performance of enormous power.
It is no coincidence that members of Nile and Carcass, as well as Phil Anselmo, wanted to pay homage to the band in the liner notes of their 2005 EP “Sour Times”: a recognition that is anything but marginal, just as the fact that Confessor's sound project may have left a clear imprint on Meshuggah's nervous and broken guitar work is not.
The labyrinthine and suffocating sound created by Confessor in this album is certainly not for everyone, but for those who managed to decode it it remained indelibly imprinted in the heart.