Uncontrolled

Confessor is a tech death band permanently stuck in a slow, pre-blast section; Confessor is old Meshuggah mixed with newest Meshuggah, Confessor is a grunge band jamming with a particularly out there prog band, played at 16 RPM, Confessor is a dinosaur with 5 legs and a banshee as a head, Confessor is what happens when you take tremedol, cocaine and some helium at the same time. To understand Confessor is to understand my intense love for strawberries. Confessor is what happens when you- what happens to all of us- when we die. Confessor is. We think, therefore, Confessor. To know Confessor is to know the dark beyond the blue.

Another, rather unromantic way of putting it, is that Confessor play a rather weird style of... stuff. It's not slowed down death metal, although it kind of is, but it's not really all that related to doom metal either, although it kind of is. It's slow, rather twisty and mangled (Confessor belong to the school of thought that if you're going to use a really weird time signature, you'd better make it really fucken weird), not terribly melodic, and the songs all sound pretty damn similar even with a lot of listening. From what I can tell, a big part of their sonic weirdness is their tendency to add an extra repeat of a riff tail everywhere, to add a few counts to a random bar, as opposed to flowing for a minute or two on a 7/8 or whatever. It's weird, man. Considering the tempos they tend to operate in you'd argue that they have the busiest drummer per BPM. Whether Meshuggah were influenced by these guys I'm not sure, but you can see why it sounds plausible. Everything just sorts of bends around weirdly, probably a lot more so than Meshuggah; these guys definitely pack more riffs into their songs, nothing is as predictable, it's a lot less headbangable, a few pretty choice moments aside.

And we haven't even gotten into the vocals yet! But man, those vocals. I'm sure if you were so inclined you could argue a lot about whether the ridiculous helium yelps from the frontman were a deliberate move to make the sound extremely absurd or a natural choice. You'd have a hell of an argument sticking by the latter point; the vocals are ridiculous, little in the way of melody lines, long, stupidly high pitched wailing parts that make little sense over the slow, churning riffs. Not a single memorable chorus part (vocal wise, all I can really remember is The Secret, which in general is the most normal song on here); ultimately it brings up a lot of questions. Is this the ultimate representation of the prog vocalist? Is this the most brutal parody? Is the Confessor vocalist trying to communicate with dogs? Is he refining his echolocation chops? We will likely never know.

Uncontrolled has an extremely unique sound, and after a few listens (writing this review on my 4th listen through) I'm no closer to really penetrating its' secrets. It's quite likely that a few months down the track I'll be rewriting this review and either adding or subtracting 35 points to the original score. As it stands though, I find the guitars extremely interesting, and the vocalist varies from "flat out sucking" to "fascinating" enough that I can't give this a negative score. I recommend a curiousity download, if nothing else; there's really nothing else out there like it.