With just three releases (counting the first EP), Unto Others have shot up near the top of my favorites among newer bands. Starting out as Idle Hands, this band made a big splash, driven by Gabriel Franco‘s sharp songwriting and the seamless chemistry among its members. Franco has a talent for writing simple but great hooks, and then giving songs a small twist here, and a clever detail there, something that is much harder than most people think. When I mention that I love Unto Others to metalheads more taken with the extreme ends of the genre I’m often met with disbelief; after all, how can a band that doesn’t do anything new or isn’t heavy “at all” be considered great? At the face of it, all Unto Others do is take some Iron Maiden and Judas Priest riffs, mix it with entry-level thrash metal, and drape it with a layer of gloom recalling greats like The Cure, Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim. But the synthesis of these elements and details is what makes this band’s music more than its parts. Not to mention that lyrically, while they have cheesy self-empowerment themes scattered throughout their songs, they also tackle heavy themes like suicide, school shooters, drug addiction, depression, the problem of evil and the general misery of existence. 2019’s Mana and 2021’s Strength are a heavy one-two punch in this regard: highly depressive albums with huge emotional pathos.
With all that and three years of constant touring with big bands like Behemoth and Carcass, Unto Others have put out their third full length effort – Never, Neverland, a title that immediately brings an uneasy connotation by reminding me of Metallica and their self titled album. You could say that it’s a subtle telegraphing of the direction Unto Others have taken with this album, as more than half the songs lean toward the softer side of their style. Songs like “Sunshine”, “Cold World” and the title track are more straight ballads, while numbers like “Angel of the Night” straddle a midpoint between ballad and rock/metal by dialling up the intricacy of the drum patterns and guitar. Then there are a lot of one-off ideas scattered across the album. “Momma Likes the Door Closed”, the best song here, is like a parody of early Metallica, “When the Kids Get Caught” is a straight up Paradise Lost song and “Flatline” brings in a Darkthrone riff into the mix, of all things. The band sounds in decent form, but the drums and Franco‘s lyrics/vocals are the stars of the show. This is not because they are doing something exceptional, but rather the songs feel restrained.
For all the ideas present, something has gone wrong with Never, Neverland. The album is 17 tracks (with two useless instrumentals) and its flow and pacing is all over the place. It bounces between gothic rock, thrash, punk rock, radio rock and black metal in a way where you can just feel the shit run down the wall. Tracks like “Flatline” are too left field and undeveloped, while songs like the carefree “Sunshine” sound as if they were played by another band entirely. After keeping the momentum up for four tracks (a neat EP right there), the rest of the album falls off a cliff and never quite recovers the pull it had. The cynic in me tells me that Unto Others are trying to please a newfound crowd of fans they have acquired while on a big label like Century Media. On the pragmatic side, I wonder instead if three years of constant touring has made Franco and team too tired to keep the quality up or to give this work the extra pass in editing it sorely needs. Much of the content would make me call this album uneven, but the issues with pacing and editing is what makes it Unto Others‘ first bad album. Don’t waste your time.
