Confessions of a Traitor – This Pain Will Serve You | Album Review

As a race, we (understandably) have a habit of veering away from what makes us uncomfortable. Death and grief being a combination that we are particularly adept at avoiding. Pretend it’s not there waiting for you for long enough, and maybe you’ll convince yourself it isn’t.

On the contrary, Confessions of a Traitor spend almost the entirety of This Pain Will Serve You’s runtime staring grief in the face and asking it to shoot its sharpest arrow. It’s as visceral as it is challenging, as vulnerable as it is aggressive. And yet, as you may have identified from its juxtapositional title: it provides hope too.

To their credit, you could remove yourself from the record’s lyrical content completely and still find something to connect to. The feverous low end of ‘Starve’ opens the record in a blazing inferno of Alpha Wolf inspired tech riffs and slicing growls, while ‘Fatal Frame’ offers an outstretched palm of soaring vocal harmonies and hook laden choruses.

However, the inescapable truth that beckons from this record is that to overlook the message is to sell yourself, and therefore the record, short. Sure, ‘Doomsayer’s dual layered chorus is a serviceable slap of modern metalcore that does little to offend, but the philosophical tone to lyrics like “I can’t find peace until I’m ready to accept myself” is where an impact is truly felt. The same cannot be said for ‘Still Haunted’ however, which (at least instrumentally) is the record’s coup de grace. The clean texture added to Jack Darnell’s emotive, sliding riffs add the backbone to a stunning vocal trade off between vocalists Stephen MacConville and Jacob Brand.

Similarly, ‘Hail Mary’ edges the record into ambitious (if not brutal) soundscapes, the appropriate choir lead opening soon expands into biblical bloodletting. With a truly heinous breakdown that comes fully equipped with a tuning low enough to give you vertigo and pinch harmonics summoned straight out of mid 2000’s Killswitch Engage catalogue. This Pain Will Serve You can often be a record that gives with one hand and takes with the other. You will either be struck by lyrical force, or revel in the swarm of a breakdown.

It’s not until the closing one-two sledgehammer punch of ‘The Sins I’m Yet To Answer For’ and ‘Half Life’ where the band are able to combine technical ferocity with lyrical aplomb. The former glides across a technical riff while offering emotional retreat for the myriad of us that can relate to “whispers at night fill me with dread” and “fear now takes control” while the latter takes the concept of ‘shall we finish on a light one?’ and laughs sardonically. There is agony dripping from every syllable of the mosh call “The reaper knows my God forsaken name” and is unquestionably Confessions’ greatest moment to date.

There’s no escaping that This Pain Will Serve You utilises the tropes its’ peers and heroes have laid down for it previously. The boat is rarely pushed out in terms of what metalcore has become in the last decade. With that said, there’s a provocative bravery to the lyrical content at play here and when sat with fully – those that have experienced loss, in any form, can find a record here that knows them, believes in them, and gives them a pathway to hope.