:: Sonata Arctica - Unia

Sonata Arctica

As good as 2004’s ‘Reckoning Night’ was, I couldn’t help but feel that unless Finnish act Sonata Arctica start to stretch a little beyond the tried and true power metal sound that seems ingrained into just about every Finnish musician within the metal scene, they’ll forever be reproducing the same album over and over again. Within the last three years, Sonata Arctica have had plenty of time to rethink their direction, and after a couple of compilations and a live album/DVD released to tide fans over in the meantime, the band are back with their fifth full-length release ‘Unia’, and a long overdue change of direction. The opening track ‘In Black And White’ is actually one of the album’s stronger efforts, with the guitars standing out as a little heavier, while Kakko’s vocals too seem to have adopted the heavier approach too, with his usual clean vocals sounding a little grittier and more aggressive. After an impressive opener, the single ‘Paid In Full’ tends to be somewhat of a disappointment with its keyboard heavy sound and predictable chorus structures, but thankfully Sonata Arctica manage to dig a little deeper and produce something a little more substantial in the dramatic trio of ‘For The Sake Of Revenge’, ‘My Dream’s But A Drop Of Fuel For A Nightmare’ and ‘Fly With The Black Swan’.

The aggression returns a bit more with the mid-paced and bombastic ‘It Won’t Fade’, ‘Caleb’, ‘The Harvest’ and the heavier still ‘The Vice’, all of which help pick up the middle section of the album, but it’s the dreary ballads that make up the second half of the album that really take away from some of the experimentation attempted within the stronger numbers. Sonata Arctica have obviously tried to do something a little different with ‘Unia’, and for that you have to commend them. But far too often, the ballads drag the album at critical points to give the album a lethargic crawl, giving the album an inconsistent feel at best. If the band continues to work on ideas and songs that actually work at giving them a change of direction rather than including more ballads to fill in the blanks, then I can see their next album redefining their status within the power metal scene. But as it stands at this moment, ‘Unia’ will be only seen as a transitional album, and a disappointing follow up to the far superior ‘Reckoning Night’.