Confession – The Long Way Home (2012)

Coming with the label of ‘similar to Parkway Drive’ and ‘one of the best Australian Metalcore bands’, made us have very low expectations for this release. However, having been produced by Fredrik Nordström we started listening to this release with a full-clean slate and no preconceptions about it. Curiously enough, “The Long Way Home” is actually a pretty decent release if you take all the faggy clean vocals sections and breakdowns (the whole Metalcore crap from it). Confession has some talent, but trying to fit into a cookie cutter mold is what ultimately made them unbearable at times to us.

After a trippy intro, “Confused/Hopeless” delivers pounding riffs and powerful vocals; all is good except that after a while the whole thing collapses with some horrible dreamy-ethereal clean vocals. Then the band suddenly goes back into full aggression mode only to come back very faggy after a bit. This is the main problem that we have with many Metalcore bands and that Confession imitates so well. Other tracks like “I Created This Horror” show some great chops at creating groovy sections with massive drums, but some weird elements here and there make you scratch your head (probably added in the mix).

There are some excellent clean sections like the opening of “Gimme ADD”, but they quickly get destroyed with either clean vocal harmonies or with very similar sounding riffs. We get it that you want to be brutal, but at least change something between songs!!! Our favorite part (not even a full song) is the clean guitar work near the end of “The True Shine Through”, very unique sounding for a release of this style.

We don’t like breakdowns followed by clean vocal leads and “The Long Way Home” just abuses them to no end. While fans of bands like Parkway Drive and Bring Me the Horizon will drool with this release, if you are looking for something more metal-ish, please stay away. Otherwise, for a typical Metalcore release, this is not totally bad.

Release: February 6th, 2012

Country: Australia