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Confide

Recover

Written by: BL on 05/07/2010 21:54:02

I always remember Confide as the Chasing Safety/Define The Great Line sounding Underoath minus the cleans (until they re-recorded "Shout The Truth" with clean vocals from their new drummer Joel Piper ofcourse), a few good songs but lacking a real definitive identity which a lot of bands lumped into that area of the scene (oh no!) seem to have a trouble dealing with. Believe it or not I did have high hopes for "Recover" because I would think that even though now they'd use clean vocals like every other band around them, I thought they might pull an Underoath and move into a more experimental territory. Oh how wrong I was it seems (quiet you, I try to be optimistic!)

By no means is "Recover" necessarily a terrible record, by that I mean I can tolerate it well enough and a few of the songs have choruses or the odd guitar melody here and there that I will have in the back of my mind when I now think of them. It's just that age old story of a band moving forwards by "borrowing" from the trendy booth just about everything from everybody. Instead of the more experimental post-hardcore I was hoping to hear, the new elements presented here actually involve a 400% increase in pretty but almost beyond identifiable clean vocals, a slew of force-fed and mostly boring breakdowns (because that's the only thing that excites most younger scenesters nowadays, unfortunately) into poppier song structures, and more low "brootal" growls from the only British member of the band (ex-Penknifelovelife lead vocalist Ross Kenyon). Confide have literally turned themselves into another by-the-numbers type of band, in an insanely saturated and incestous music scene.

Perhaps I should have seen it coming, as the mixing duties were done courtesy of the king of anything-core production Joey Sturgis. His digitised guitar tone fits the music for sure (I still enjoy how the lead guitars sound so warm and smooth, even if a little artificial), and the bass guitar has surprisingly actually been beefed up in the mix which I have begun to notice in a lot of his latest records (maybe he's been reading my critique?). His drums may always sound similar, but at least they pack a decent punch and you never really miss a beat. I would have loved to hear more of the intricate kind of lead guitar (well as intricate as it will get with this kind of band anyway) in songs like "The View From My Eyes" or "People Are Crazy", though the latter suffers from a few too many plain riffs elsewhere (or like in the case of "Now Or Never", replacing a decent-ish riff with a chugging breakdown). "Delete, Repeat" and "Tell Me I'm Not Alone" are my other standout picks just because they have some well written catchy clean vocals and with their minimal heaviness, are the most cheery sounding.

"Recover" is a difficult album to recommend to those wanting something more unique or rewarding, although if you're looking to settle into the most plain and basic kind of comtemporary post-hardcore/metalcore (I mean like Of Mice & Men standard only the clean singing isn't anywhere near as good) then by all means there's maybe a few CD-spins worth of lukewarm entertainment to be found here. Otherwise if you're actually slightly more sensible you can do so much better elsewhere I'm afraid.

Download: "The View From My Eyes", "Delete, Repeat", "Tell Me I'm Not Alone"
For the fans of: Of Mice & Men, Agraceful, Gwen Stacy (new)
Listen: Myspace

Release date 18.05.2010
Tragic Hero Records Records