Track Listing

1. Scarlet Sunrise
2. Leaves of Three
3. Scream Trapped Under Water
4. Forgive & Regret
5. 12 Oz. Prophet
6. Southern Spirit Suite
7. Pretty Smiles & Shattered Teeth
8. Liquor & Cigarettes
9. Theory of Pride in Tragedy
10. Fingernails on a Chalkboard
11. Paper Cut
12. They Lie to Hide the Truth
13. Another Cheap Brand of Luck
14. This Glass House of Broken Words
15. Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #214372 in Music
• Released on: 2005-07-19
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

Customer Reviews

Soilent Green will murder your soul
You can't even fully comprehend how much this band freaking rules. I mean every song is absolutely scorching. One minute they're grinding away with these wicked blast beats and then out of nowhere comes a monolithic chunk of ultra slowed down doom riffing. Tommy Buckley's percussion work is flawless, and Ben Falgoust is certainly one of the best vocalists in metal. Listen in amazement as he switches, seemingly effortlessly, from a black metal rasp to a death growl to an unhinged hardcore bellow and back again, all in the same song.

Relapse's best band, back for more
Meshuggah/Dillinger Escape Plan fans take note: with Confrontation, their fourth album (and first since the tragic death of bassist Scott Williams) Soilent Green have further solidified their place on the short list of modern heavy music's greatest bands. Since I've already written reviews of their previous two masterpieces, I'm pretty much out of adjectives and superlatives to describe this band's greatness, so I'm going to try something a little different this time around. Following is a list of things that you will and won't find on this album, which will hopefully convey some idea of whether it's up your alley. So without further ado, here goes.

First up, what you will NOT find on Confrontation:

-Anything that smacks of trendiness, be it keyboards, clean vocals, hardcore breakdowns, or nicked melodeath guitar work that In Flames wore out five years ago.

- Any of the tired cliches that mark subpar "extreme" metal: over-the-top cookie-monster vocals, boring-as-heck guitar riffs, shlocky satanic imagery, drumming that substitutes endless blastbeats for imagination and variety.

-Simplistic, verse/chorus song structures that get old around the third time you hear them.

-"Interludes" that consist of nothing more than pointless and interminable noodling, the kind that have dragged down numerous potentially excellent albums in the past (See: Mars Volta, Frances the Mute).

Now, here's a sampling of what you WILL find here:

-Some of the most vicious, abrasive, and confrontational metal ever recorded. You want heaviness? Soilent Green deliver it in spades, dillingently pounding away at your senses with the kind of aural assault few bands have ever dared to attempt and even fewer have done well.

-FAR more atmosphere and intelligence than you have any right to expect from an album this heavy. Soilent Green have always been one of the best (if not THE best) at plunging listeners into the demented mood of their recordings and this album is no exception. You can really feel the emotional pain oozing out of these tracks. Couple that with a sound that borrows liberally from grind, thrash, doom, death, and punk and you've got one of the most distinctive bands ever to hit the metal genre.

-Complex, constantly shifting, jarring song structures that will almost literally make your head spin. These guys can cram more tempo changes into a single minute than most bands will manage in a whole career. Drummer Tommy Buckley is one of the best in the business, equally adept at high-speed blastbeats and octopus-like fills, allowing him to create drum patterns so intricate you'd practically have to send away to NASA to calculate them. Guitarists Brian Patton and Tony White aren't far behind, creating oscillating, intertwining riff structures that rival anything the likes of Suffocation have produced.

-Yet another commanding, oppressive vocal performance from the one and only Louis Benjamin Falgoust II. Ben's vocals meld perfectly with the sounds of the band behind him, as he screams, growls, snarls, and spits out his poetically twisted lyrics.

So, there you have it. I listen to lots of different music, extreme or otherwise, and Soilent Green have emerged as one of my top three or so most consistently enjoyed acts. We've got a few months to go, but I think at this point I can safely name Confrontation my album of the year.

Southern sludge at its finest
Soilent Green have been in car wrecks, have had their bassist murdered, and they even suffered through the whole Hurricane Katrina disaster, but they still managed to return and release their seventh effort in 2005. And with "Confrontation," I don't think anyone can deny that Soilent Green are now well deserving of being called sludgecore's frontrunners--they rank right up there next to Eyehategod. Like a mix of Crowbar, Pantera, and Dillinger Escape Plan, this album is skull crushing. It's more relentless than the sun on a hot summer's day, and heavier than a family of elephants. The drums sound like they're played with a sledgehammer, and the vocals are deep, gruff, constipated, and occasionally Phil Anselmo-esque, but the guitars dominate the rhythm section. You barely hear any actual guitar notes or riffs, you just hear a mind numbing wall of "dirty" sounding, intensely downtuned and distorted guitar noise. And, whether opting for rapid-fire rhythms ("Scream Trapped Under Water" has pounding, machine gun drums, and "12 Oz. Prophet" has a jackhammer rhythm), or slowly grinding songs, the whole album is equally as brutal. Highlights include the scorching seventh track, "This Glass House of Broken Words" (which sounds like you're sitting in between two opposing ships firing cannons at each other), the b-b-brutal "Theory of Pride in Tragedy," the circular, buzzsaw guitars and walloping drums on "They Lie to Hide the Truth," and the churning, steam rolling album closer, "Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem." Not many C.D.'s of this genre were released in 2005, but between this album and Crowbar's "Lifesblood for the Downtrodden," "Confrontation" definitely takes the cake for the best sludge/doom metal album of the year.