 Confession is the second album from New Jersey six-piece Ill Niño, whose first album Revolution Revolucion saw the group enjoying reasonable worldwide success. Extensive touring in order to promote the first album gave the group an invaluable opportunity to bond, both personally and musically, and this has resulted in a certain feeling of maturity emerging in Ill Niño's sound.
As on Revolution Revolucion, the band's sound is a fusion of spiky industrial guitars with an infectious Latino undercurrent. This is very much continued on Confession, with tracks such as How Can I Live, Letting Go and Numb deploying that fusion to particularly good effect. When compared to their debut, Confession doesn't seem quite as raw or powerful, and certain tracks come across as slightly overproduced. There is also somewhat of a repetitious feel to the lyrical themes of the tracks, and at times a similarly repetitious feel to frontman Cristian Machado's vocal. Having said that, there is a definite originality to the album, which offers an effective mixture of aggression and emotion in equal measures.
On the whole, Confession is an accomplished album of strong, melodically brooding tracks that show a good use of light and dark throughout and, despite the band having gone through a number of line-up changes, shows Ill Niño to be a technically tight unit with definite signs of plenty more to come in the future. :: Philip Goodfellow |
