Album Review: Carnifex - 'Graveside Confessions'

Many old-school, hardcore death metal fans are in heavy denial about this, but modern deathcore is the perfect, ‘large step forward’ evolution of brutal death metal and extreme music in general. Generally speaking, it is even more brutal, more virtuosic, and more imaginative than most death metal.

And Californians Carnifex have been at the forefront of this century’s deathcore surge for well over a decade.

Graveside Confessions is this band’s eighth album, and it finds them in ripping form. It is fourteen tracks and over an hour’s worth of blistering deathcore, guaranteed to strip the flesh from your bones and grind your bones into dust, and features a very ‘Carnifexed’ cover of what happens to be this reviewer’s all time favourite Korn tune, Dead Bodies Everywhere, which holds up very nicely indeed. It does exactly what a good cover should, pays great and respectful homage to, and maintains the essence of, the original without being an absolute carbon copy.

Like much deathcore, upon a purely cursory listen, Carnifex sounds kinda samey, all violent, jagged riffs, lightning double bass drumming flying every which way, neck-snapping breakdowns and wall to wall throat-ripping unlean vocals. As with many bands and genres of music, it’s only when you listen and experience it on a deeper level do their subtleties and intricacies become apparent. This record takes the listener on a journey - an albeit violent, bludgeoning one - across brutal soundscapes and takes the ears and the psyche into some interesting territory. This band deems itself ‘blackened deathcore’, and it does indeed resemble a more traditional black metal sound at times (Check out Cursed and Carry Us Away for examples). 

The band throws in some symphonic and choral elements here and there, which only add to the bombast and lend the album a gothic, horror movie soundtrack vibe at times (see Countess Of Perpetual Torment), and light and shade is apparent in the piece. There is even a quieter, stringy acoustic instrumental piece (which gets a touch louder about two-thirds of the way in) called January Nights, which, to be brutally honest, seems just a smidgeon underdeveloped. Great idea, and kudos to an extreme band for having the guts to put it on there, it just needed a little extra to make it the magical, late album dynamic moment it could have been.

Of course, music that goes to such extremities needs a vocalist of power, variation and facility, and frontman Scott Lewis is one of the best in extreme music, sliding from the death growls to the pig squeals to the blackened screeches with seemingly effortless aplomb.

Graveside Confessions is an absolute beast of an album, and displays a long-running extreme band in fine fettle.

Find out more about Carnifex here.