Review Summary: Fast, brutal, heavy but still mediocre boring.
Hailing from Syracuse, New York is a slightly newish band named Unholy. Although they share their name with another band named Unholy, one of the leaders of doom metal coming out of Finland in the early 90’s, this new band plays a better, fast style of thrashy goodness. While this band is new to the underground metal scene as a whole, its members are not. Unholy is made up of members from bands such as Path of Resistance, Another Victim and a little known band called Godbelow.
Their sophomore album title of New Life Behind Closed Eyes, was written by the bands’ guitarist and was described as the concept of the final days of humanity delivered by its’ own hand. Ten tracks of thrash infused melodic hardcore is just what Unholy set out to accomplish when recording this record, and they succeeded tenfold. The entire album is laden with heavy guitar work and death metal influenced drumming, enough to make any fan attempting a cover tired after the first minute of practice.
The opening track, “Seeker Immortal” is the one track of the whole album that takes the cake. It has insane speed guitar playing and drum beats that would make any listener want more. The first three tracks are consistent, but it fails to deliver on the spectrum of the entire album. The disc in its entirety is a success, but it is neither terrible nor astounding. The vocals stay at a steady hardcore growl, where maybe they should have gone with a clean pitch in there every once in a while. Like stated earlier the guitar work is impeccable except for the bass lines which I had a hard time deciphering. Taking their influences of possibly Slayer, Anthrax and Lamb of God, Unholy who is mostly proclaimed as “hardcore” seems to have quite a side of thrash or speed metal in them.
They seem to stick to the same type of music the whole way through, only straying away for a possible guitar solo. The seventh track titled “No Faith” is a two minute instrumental that should have been put in the middle of the disc to give us a break between the nonstop head banging. One other part of the new disc I feel must be mentioned is the intro to the third track titled “These Wounds Never Heal”; it may not be the most creative or technical, but it is the second most outstanding intro next to the first song.
Few and far between are creative guitar solos that just leave the listener wondering when the song is going to end and where the next one begins. They have a couple good introductions as mentioned before, but more creativeness in their introductions would help the listener establish song from song and not feel the album is one really long song as I often did. Had you not thrown in a two second delay between songs, you might not have been able to notice that they were different songs. Hardcore riffs, guttural growls, speedy guitar work and some pretty quick hands by the drummer make up the base of this new CD by the thrash influenced hardcore band Unholy. If you like anything that sounds like a merger between Slayer, hardcore vocals and fill-heavy drumming go pick up the new Unholy record on May 12th, 2009 from your favorite record store.
