The Finnish folk/druid metal band Unshine comes up with their new album ‘Astrala’, an album with quite a special cover. The title underneath is made out of the roots of trees, while the title above the ground is the remainder of the burned trees after what seems to be a forest fire. I think it’s up to our own imagination what we see in the cover. Unshine consists of Susanna Vesilahti (vocals), Jari Hautala (guitar), Teemu Vähäkangas (bass), Jukka Hantula (drums) and Harri Hautala (guitar and keyboards), who says the following about their album:

UNSHINE has always been a band without the traditional role models. For us, the most important thing in a song is the melody. Sounds and rhytms create the overall atmosphere, but the melody wakes up the whole ancient story in it to life. Secondly, it all starts from the nature and it all will end to the nature. This cuts through all aspects of our music. It echoes from those landscapes the modern world has almost totally abandoned and forgotten. The songs try to re-unite the old bonds between the dolmen gods and the digitized mankind. Nature is not our enemy, it’s our physical, but especially our spiritual home. That’s why we call our music druid metal. All five of us in the band, were raised in the middle of forests and fields, in the countryside villages of Western Finland. I highly appreciate the fact that this same band has kept together for over 15 years now. We have also known each other since our adolescence times. Of course, everyone has their own musical preferences: Susanna loves traditional Finnish melodic music, Jari and Teemu are metal men, Jukka is more in to prog and jazz and I listen mainly to 70’s folk rock and synth music. We are very excited to start the work in our new home label Rockshots Music. Our fourth album, ASTRALA, is now at the doorstep and it has been a huge evolutionary leap for us. We have stepped in to the whole new level of co-operation with the initial forces of the nature.

The album starts with a calm intro and after a few seconds of complete silence, the first song ‘Kainuun Kuningas’ brings a strong start. The piccolo used to immitate a bird’s song creates a happy feeling. Mezzo soprano Susanna‘s vocals are clean and very relaxing to listen to. This song is sung in Finnish just as ‘Suo (Kantaa Ruumiit)’.

The second song ‘Jack’s Feast’ is the first English song on this album with a Finnish accent.  Most of the time you hear heavy drums with heavy guitar with somewhere in between a little dance music. ‘The Masks Of Enchantment’ is also a song which combines heavy parts with folk music you can dance to.

Halfway the album Unshine brings the happiness back from the beginning with ‘Pan The One’. I noticed they use an organ sound in this album, in this song you can hear it the best, which confuses me a bit because I don’t understand what this instrument has to do with nature. The happiness grows with ‘Druids Are A-Coming’ and it keeps that way until the end of the album, where the music slows down a bit.

Musically, ‘Astrala’ is a strong album. They change heavy parts with folk parts or slow parts, they even combine the heavy instruments with other instruments. Vocally there’s little variation which makes it a tad boring after a while and I regret that the vocals fade away within the heavy parts of the songs.

Release date: January 19th, 2018
Label: Rockshots Records
Tracklist:
1. Birch Of Fornjot (intro)
2. Kainuun Kuningas
3. Jack’s Feast
4. The Masks Of Enchantment
5. Pan The One
6. Druids Are A-Coming
7. Slow Moving Creatures
8. Visionary’s Last Breath
9. Suo (Kantaa Ruumiit)
10. The Forest