Unhale
Human Race

Metalcore from Austria was not really on my wishlist for this christmas, but then again preconceptions is not my thing so I gave it a shot anyway. The first thing I noticed was a pretty poor album cover that does not do anything for me, moreover it is of a genre that I am not very fascinated by to be honest, sure there are one or two decent bands in there but not really that much impressive stuff. But sure, never judge a book by its cover, or its name it is always fair to give the music a chance which is what I have done.

And I can conclude that musically it is fairly standard metalcore, perhaps with a slight lean towards the death metal side of things with some more death metal elements included but overall it is metalcore. The vocals are quite typical and so is the production and nothing really stands out with what Unhale does, their music is quite average for the genre and after listening for a few times I find it hard to muster the will to go through the album again and that is despite the fact that the album plays for 33 and a half minute which can hardly be said to be a long playing time, can it? But the problem is that this album lacks variation and becomes quite stagnant quite fast and then the growly vocals and the aggression becomes more of a tiring wall than anything that stirs any emotion.

I still think that it is decently well done and though it is quite dull it is hard to say that it is bad because they clearly know their skills and all of that, it just falls flat because of the songs. The songs are not quite up to the standards that you can hear the band having and as I said I struggle with this album as it is just difficult to listen to because of the staleness and also the band’s lack of an own identity can also be a bit detrimental.

Not the best album I have heard in 2012 and far from the worst as well, I would say that Unhale’s second album lands somewhere around the lower regions of the big pile of average music. A not of caution though, if you are a genuine fan of metalcore I do think that you might find this interesting but if you aren’t you’d do better to enjoy some other album. And with all those things written and no sense made at all I can just state for the record that this is a record for the already snowed in on the genre, the rest of us can safely look somewhere else for our musical kicks.

HHHHHHH