Yellow Eyes – Confusion Gate (Review)

This is the seventh album from Yellow Eyes, a black metal band from the US.

I last caught up with Yellow Eyes on their 2019 record Rare Field Ceiling, so the unexpected unveiling of Confusion Gate is a welcome surprise. With a 61-minute duration it’s the band’s longest album by a decent margin, so let’s embark on this journey and see what awaits us.

Confusion Gate presents as a compelling exemplar of modern black metal mixed with elements of industrial, ambient, and medieval folk. It’s an idiosyncratic collection of tracks, with an abundance of detailing, layers, and textured depth to explore. It’s harsh and abrasive, but not without nuance or ethereal grace. It’s an evocative clash between a nightmare realm and a diaphanous dreamscape, where both merge into a single glorious abomination more terrifying and more transcendent than either could ever be separately.

Confusion Gate is a very well-crafted album, but not in the sense of it being polished, pristine, or surgically precise. No, this is harsh, rough, and hostile through and through. However, it’s still clear that the album has benefited from having had a lot of thought, attention, and care put into it. In this way, this best of ways, Confusion Gate is a mastercrafted record that excels in its songwriting, structuring, flow, and execution.

Yellow Eyes are adept at unleashing creative darkness on the listener. The songs deploy warped melodies that somehow imbue the material with a strange beauty, one that’s laced with spiteful dissonance. They exude potent malice, while also encompassing a breadth of expansive atmosphere that’s sickeningly seductive; an embrace of haunting terror that feels just as alluring as it does subversive. Each track has a hypnotic voice of its own, tempting the listener in ever closer, until it’s too late to pull back.

Confusion Gate is a remarkable, engrossing piece of work. Yellow Eyes are tenacious in their quest for intimate aggression and spectral darkness. The songs combine so many different influences into a coherent, charismatic whole, that every listen is an intoxicating, furious, relentlessly enjoyable experience.

Essential listening.