I'm learning to sorta completely gloss over promos that I know will bore me to tears or will just be shitty without being fun to pick on, and so as a result I find myself pretty frequently just skipping over most of the melodeath that gets sent my way. Something about Unmasked struck me as different though. I don't know why, aesthetically this is 100% the kind of boring, riffless pedantry that makes me write off a vast majority of the genre as worthless nonsense, but it was the track lengths that caught my eye. Behind the Mask features only five tracks, but it still runs for a full 40 minutes thanks to four of the tracks breaking the eight minute mark (oddly enough, they sequentially run for 8:10, 8:20, 8:30, and 8:40). I felt like this quintet from Bonn had to have some interesting ideas if they were able to stretch their compositions for such a lengthy amount of time so consistently. It's not easy to breach eight minutes when you're just doing the In Flames style of "Iron Maiden with growls" that melodeath so frequently devolves into.
Thirty seconds into the first track, I realized exactly what my mistake was and instantly knew how the rest of the album was going to play out. If you're gonna take the Gothenburg style and make the songs really long, you need to be exceptionally skilled songwriters. However, Unmasked doesn't play the Gothenburg style. Instead, they take most of their influence from the school of Insomnium and Be'lakor, which is way easier to utilize in order to lazily fart out long songs. I don't know how I didn't see this coming. I covered Marianas Rest a few months ago and they operate on the exact same conceit so I really only have myself to blame for being caught off guard here.
The reason Behind the Mask bores me so much is that these guys only really scratch the superficial surface of the style they're playing. "Gaia" has some okay moments but the atmosphere is incredibly passive and unengaging. "Home" is the lone average length song but it doesn't achieve that by being faster and more exciting, it's simply shorter and doesn't repeat as much. There's some bouncing groove and rolling double bass here and there in "Drenched in Blood" and "No Regrets" but each section featuring a new and interesting idea is disappointingly brief and still never does much to break beyond the established tropes of the genre. Insomnium is so revered not simply because they were pioneers, but because they continually break their own rules and push ideas to extremes. Their tempos can vary quite a lot, and even though each album is very tonally consistent within itself, the atmosphere is incredibly pervasive and confident. Unmasked here just kinda plays what's expected of them and waffles around with dry ideas that dozens of bands have beaten them to already. I swear every section of every track sits within the same 10bpm window, never fully taking a risk and going for a more aggressive Be'lakor-esque section or a fully death/doom Swallow the Sun-esque dirge. They merely flirt with such ideas here and there, never fully committing to anything, instead sheepishly looking across the bar at these much more interesting and attractive ideas before quickly looking back at their drinks whenever they try to engage. Even the keyboards have like a total of sixty seconds where they do anything beyond playing swelling chords in the background and actually take the lead and carry a melody. Why even bother? It's basically just a backing track that never turns off.
Apart from a few riffs with a decent bouncing groove on the title track and "No Regrets", there's really nothing here that I can recommend. This is a very unconfident and timid album, and it suffers from this seemingly crippling fear to do anything else with their ideas beyond dipping their toes in them and deciding that the temperature isn't right and retreating back into the pool house. You can tell there's potential for a decent entry into this melancholic melodeath niche, but Unmasked aren't even close to reaching that point yet. As of now, they're entirely skippable.
RATING: 31%
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