Confess
Burn 'em All

The Swedish band Confess has been releasing music for a decade now and according to the label their previous two albums has been quite successful. We didn’t review them, but we did review their 2012 effort The Gin Act and thought that it had its moments but was overall slightly forgettable. Since then a long time has passed, two new albums have seen the light of day and the cover certainly has improved since 2012. You can also hear the progression in the music, how the songs become more obvious and confident as the band has improved their craft and things come easier to them. The problem with perfecting your craft is that many that do tend to become a bit bland and then both boring and tedious, look at the likes of Iron Maiden and others that have been around for a long while, most of the stuff they release are boring copies of their earlier ideas. I wouldn’t however, claim that Confess falls into that category, this is a more interesting album than the last one I reviewed.

It is sleaze rock, stylistically not far from the previous album I reviewed and akin to bands like Mötley Crüe and bands similar to that. The label describes it as the perfect mixture of their previous two albums, and that probably isn’t too far off, especially if you remove the word perfect that is a word I think should be used with caution when reviewing music, or movies, or other cultural and subjective things. It is a confident album, the songs are easy to take to and the variation quite good, the energy is great as well. Decent vocals and good production are other things I notice when listening to this album, and it becomes very clear to me that the band has improved quite a bit since I reviewed them last.

The genre has also improved quite a bit since then and they are still sitting in the same quality bracket of the genre as they did then, they are good but not really up there with the best. It feels like the confidence and clarity they have in their album now should have been used to more daring things, I think they should have dared to move outside the box. Doing what everyone else is doing will never make an impact and in the end you listen to this album for a while before you put it away for good. It is an album that is closer to the middle-of-the-road than the more exciting side roads the more interesting bands chose to travel.

If you are a fan of the sleaze rock genre it is a very good chance that you will like this album, the Confess fans will certainly like it and hail it as a masterpiece – as they should. The more casual music listener will probably be less impressed, the genre has more interesting albums to offer and while this album is good it is still bound to find its way into oblivion very soon. It is one of those albums that you play, and you like quite a bit when playing it, then you look back at it and realise that it is more or less the same as every other album you have written about. In the extremely saturated world of music you really need to do more than this if you want you work to stand out and be noticed. There are probably several that will buy this album, but very few of them will remember that they have it a few years from now, it will be one more of those albums that you just have and never play.

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