I know I'm in the minority. You'd be hard pressed to find a more polarizing band on the early 90s Earache Records roster than the North Carolina outfit Confessor. There are those of us that think that these guys were demented geniuses who delivered one of the most unique sounds to come out of the American metal underground. Then there are those that think that Confessor were total garbage. While I strongly disagree with those that hold that opinion, you can't argue that Confessor's weirdo tech-doom isn't a challenging listen, and not for all tastes. Musically, these guys were ridiculous, playing a strange sort of doom-laden metal wrapped around bizarre architectural riffing and brain-scrambling time signatures that often had them compared to prog-thrash giants Watchtower. But it was the unique, love-em-or-hate-em vocals of frontman Scott Jeffreys that either endeared or enraged audiences, and this weird mixture hasn't gotten any less confounding in the decades since the release of the band's infamous 1991 debut. Condemned is a classic slab of oddball prog-doom that's finally been reissued after a long stint in OOP-purgatory, now available on both CD and vinyl, and it's as always recommended (with reservations) to anyone obsessed with the more off-kilter, prog-damaged end of extreme metal. Your certainly not going to hear anything else quite like it.

Confessor scramble your head right out of the gate with the lopsided math-doom of opener "Alone", as crushing, angular riffs stagger around the rhythm section's confusional time signatures and oddball rhythmic changes, but it's Scott Jeffreys and his high-pitched, almost Geddy Lee-esque wail that pushes this into utterly singular territory; seemingly singing either behind or ahead of the beat, Jeffreys delivers one of the strangest vocal performances in extreme metal history, enough so that plenty of folks have written this album off completely simply due to his singing style, finding them entirely too off-putting. For some like myself, however, his monotone falsetto yowl has an oddball charm that's intrinsic to Condemned's bizarre vibe, and indeed continue to grow on me with each new listen. It's been described by some detractors as sounding almost improvisational, but there are these weird little melodic hooks that emerge in his singing that weirdly work so well, there's got to be a twisted logic behind them. Musically, these nine songs are pretty far out, definitely very goddamn heavy, but in the form of jaggedly arranged prog-doom riffscapes that in some ways share Watchtower's level of difficulty, albeit fused to a slower, more Sabbathoid level of heaviness; backed by a crackerjack rhythm section (who would later go on to form the math-metal band Loincloth), the band frequently threatens to drop into a monstrous groove (and sometimes delivers - whenever that happens, it's absolutely skull-flattening), but more often subverts those buildups and expectations by spinning out into yet another, even more complicated blast of snare-heavy anti-funk. It's probably only comparable to what Candiria were doing rhythmically a few years later, and listening to this again makes me think that Confessor had to be more than a little influential on that NYC jazz/fusion/deathcore outfit. Man, I love this album. These guys were utterly unique and way ahead of their time, attacking their music with a rhythmic complexity that other bands wouldn't really begin to explore for several more years. And even then, no one ever came close to capturing the insane feel of this stuff.