Confessions Of A Traitor, born in 2013 and consisting of Stephen MacConville on vocals, Jack Darnell and Dominic Pool on guitars, Tony Nagle on bass and Seb Olrog on drugs, are even now charging up a nice little hype motor over their live shows.
Their latest EP ‘Illuminate’ is, however, not as hype-inducing. This kind of metalcore demonstrated by bands like Oh, Sleeper and My Ticket Home was already sounding generic when first it was written and ‘Illuminate’ does nothing to break that mould.
The guitar work is nice, if somewhat basic. The breakdowns serve the purpose that every breakdown does (i.e. makes the listener want to headbang their computer monitor to dust) and the riffs are somewhat same-y throughout. There’s a lot of While She Sleeps style riffing (see ‘The Fires We Burn Are Boundless’, arguably the best song out of the five) but again it sounds very “I’ve heard this before” and Confessions Of A Traitor fall just shy of making that kind of sound their own.
The vocals are also fairly average; there is nothing wrong with MacConville’s delivery it just has a tendency to be fairly incidental when compared to the instrumentation behind it. When the clean vocals do appear, they are more than adequate, but the harsh vocals could definitely have benefited from a deeper and richer sound in the recording process.
‘Illuminate’, though far from the best or most original music ever made, is nonetheless energetic and fast-paced enough to carry the songs through a number of listens, and it’s easy to imagine limbs flying and heads banging to songs like ‘The Light We Possess Is Relentless’ in a live venue.
ANDY LEDDINGTON