Eternal Fury of the Disillusioned Ones

As if Morbid Angel and Morpheus Descends hopped in the teleporter from The Fly, Spain’s Confined offer a bristling, clear, and tight iteration of old school technical death metal, before the genre became neutron star levels of dense and impenetrable. The packaging is modest but crisp, a refreshingly austere presentation that allows us full view of the three dimensional riffcraft without needless distraction.

Whilst we could broadly locate ‘Eternal Fury of the Disillusioned Ones’ within a percussive death metal setting, there are pronounced melodic flourishes along with nods to thrash and even groove metal at times. But overall the compositions are non-linear, throwing out clipped up segments of rhythmic violence to upset the forward momentum of each piece, or else rolling drums and fluid guitar work undulates around a tonal resolution of sorts but never actually grants the listener a sense of relief.

Drums, whilst tinny, are crystal clear and suitably powerful, easily cutting through the mix without stealing the show. Guitars offer a grounded, street level tone free of any weighty reverb or chasmicley dirgey leads. Vocals stick with an old school style of guttural distortion, rhythmic in its emphasis in line with the hardcore origins of this style, again with little in the way of flourishes offered at the mixing desk to enhance the presentation in any way.

But directness of intent should not be confused with reductivism. The riffs are complex, undulating between cluttered interplays of chromatic exchanges, off-kilter cadential flourishes, and more traditional melodic refrains crowbarred into the compositions by way of contextualising material. Solos are thin on the ground, but we are compensated by frequent lead refrains that tend to poke the rhythm guitar, forcing it into uncomfortable and demanding shapes.

Despite the disjointed, organised chaos of these pieces, there is a fluidity to them, discernible to any veteran ear of death metal. They flow by with a pleasing momentum and ease that marks Confined out as experienced masters of the craft.

Originally published at Hate Meditations