Album review: UnSun – The End Of Life

The cover art for The End Of Life makes it pretty clear what the marketing people thought was the main selling point of Polish goth-metal outfit UnSun… and on purely aesthetic grounds, their blonde and buxom singer Aya is a wise choice. She’s very much pushed to the forefront of UnSun‘s music, too, despite the presence of guitarist Mauser (formerly of Polish death-metallers Vader) in the roster.

The End Of Life takes its root sounds from melodic death metal, goth and pop, and the end result is as marketable as it is superficial. Throaty guitars and glacial synths chug and chime over retriggered drums, with Aya’s cutie-girl vocals riding over the thrumming engine of UnSun‘s rhythm section, almost incongruously.

It’s quite a pretty voice she has, too, but unfortunately she doesn’t use it to its full extent, with the delivery on each track sounding much the same as the last. You find yourself rooting for her, urging her to dig into the tunes and give The End Of Life some proper power – but screaming or screeching, just a proper full-throated female roar. But either the ability’s not there or UnSun didn’t feel it was appropriate.

Maybe they have a point; the night-and-day contrast created by The End Of Life‘s tug-of-war between dark goth-metallic grind and radio-friendly song-structures would be quickly derailed by making Aya sound less vulnerable and delicate. The unfortunate side effect is that the backing tunes – which throw elements of electronica into the metallic mix in some fairly intriguing ways – end up relegated to being little more than set-dressing.

And where there is set-dressing, there will cliché be found. As soon as you hear the morose piano intro of “Face The Truth”; you can almost picture the video, with its inevitable hints of period costume and long panning shots as the band rock out in a leaf-strewn forest in late autumn. It’s followed closely by “The Other Side” which sees Unsun rev up the goth-metal engines and drive for speed and power… but still with Aya singing over the top as if she’d not actually heard the backing track before going into record. Switch out the guitars for more mainstream synths and samples, and – like much of The End Of Life – this could be daytime MTV europop.

That goes double for “Memories” which – heard in isolation – is almost genreless, with its acoustic arpeggios and delicate vocals. Closing up proceedings on The End Of Life, “Indifference” hints at what might have been – fragmented beats diluted down from early Nine Inch Nails tracks, slashing guitar chords, and a pace that – for once – seems to match Aya’s delivery perfectly.

There’s no sin to making a metal pop album; UnSun‘s error was in not embracing the pop side quite as fully at all levels as they might have done. The End Of Life‘s quotidian metal undertones are wasted beneath the radio-friendly architecture of the tunes, and playing up to the electronic angle a bit more would have at least added some novelty value. That said, it’ll go down well with the same stripy-tights’n'fake-dreadlocks crowd who keep buying Evanescence albums… which may be more than some small part of the reason Century Media chose to release it in the first place.