• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

I thought the self-titled debut from Germany's The Unity sounded familiar and when I saw that almost every band member was in the now split-up LOVE.MIGHT.KILL I understood why. Add in Gamma Ray's Henjo Richter and Michel Ehre and you've got a Power Metal band on your hands. Or maybe "melodic metal" is more apt as this band plays a slick, smooth style that is supremely easy on the ears, with just enough crunch and speed to avoid being nothing more than a hard rock band.

The album is formulaic, opening with a speedy number ("Rise and Fall"), then a crunchy mid-tempo track ("No More Lies") followed by an anthem ("God of Temptation"), all sticking with traditional lyrical topics about life, love and loss. The obligatory ballad "The Wishing Well" is inoffensive with its mid-80s Rush guitar riff and Whitesnake vocal lines. After the ballad, the speedy/mid-tempo/anthem model is repeated, in a variety of configurations, throughout the rest of the album with no single song doing much to distinguish itself from the others. To quote a word I used earlier, inoffensive sums up The Unity.

If you live and breathe "happy" Power Metal in the vein of Masterplan and Angra, The Unity will probably sound pretty good. For everyone else, you've heard this album a hundred times before so there's no real reason to seek it out.