Confined 7" (self released 1995)

Confined 7”
1. Dead Inside
2. Beginning of the End
3. Fall From Grace
4. Code
5. Never Again
6. Just out of Reach

It should be no surprise to any hardcore enthusiast that there’s dozens upon dozens of lost gems out there; bands outside the group normal, canonical candidates, who might have released a 7” (if that) and then disappeared into obscurity. It’s good to see folks picking up on those gems and exposing them to others throughout the blogosphere. 7inchpunk and Kill From the Heart are both prime examples of great resources; there are obviously others. With a few exceptions, most of the bands are from the 80’s but I’d like to give some love to a grossly overlooked record that came out of NJHC in the 90’s which was pretty all right, particularly because folks tend to think of that time as the “dark ages" of NJHC, and some of the folks involved back then who KNEW what was up should get some sort of recognition, as opposed to all the usual suspects...

Confined were a short-lived band that came and went without playing too many shows. I believe members were from Southern Jersey (Trenton area) and perhaps PA as well. They played a couple of the Princeton Arts Council shows and elsewhere, had a demo, this 6 song 7”, and that was it. I believe their bass player—a big burly dude with a shaved head, also played bass in the PA emo band Autumn, and used to cover Sick of it All’s “Clobberin’ Time” during their set. How’s that for a favored cover by an emo band?

Never heard their demo but I picked up one of their 7”s after one of those aforementioned Arts Council shows, and it fucking smoked. Pretty straight-forward thrashy hardcore punk with just a touch of metal crunch. All in all, I guess you could criticize it as being generic—the short, curt vocal lines, the barked lyrics, the verse/ chorus/ verse/ breakdown song structure. But this picked up on a style of hardcore that had been waning in popularity in NJ for quite some time; around ’95/ ’96 was just the beginning of the so-called youth crew revival, and most bands still opted for a more-metallic hardcore influenced by turn of the decade NYHC or bands like Earth Crisis. Hell, even Kurbjaw had longer, less straight-up hc sounding songs as this was right around the time the dude from CC4J started singing for them. (The “punk” bands of the time were playing more tried and true “hardcore punk.” Fast-forward to the late 90’s and all these neo-youth-crew-come-latelies were fronting on how they liked the “older” style of hardcore for such a long time.

And the only time I saw or heard of this record being praised was in the pages of In Effect fanzine. Props to Chris Wynne on that one!

I’d post some mp3s up of either of these if I knew how to work one of those fuckin’ converter things.


I think ll of these dudes wound up playing with Chris A (now a personality in blog-land himself, since he does A Blaze in the NJ Sky) in Dogs of War, which took it back even further and did straight up Negative Approach/ Necros style hardcore. I don’t think they did anything else besides a ’96 demo which was pretty damn good. Chris recently posted that on his blog, which you should check out. Go HERE and scroll down til you get to the Dogs of War demo.