Album review: UnityTX – Ferality

By DAN SOUTHALL

UnityTX IS a band that want to remind you of 1999 whilst insisting their music is the ‘new shit’.  If  you remember music in 1999, it wasn’t all bad featured some interesting characters and evolutions in music, the biggest perhaps the integration of rap culture and swagger through bands like HedPE and hardcore elements with the likes of downset.

UnityTX take that nu-metal culture, add in spices from modern metal with djenty riffs, as well as elements stolen straight from the Korn playbook. Jumping right in, “Rotting Away (GORE)” and its immediate follow up “Burnout” come straight from the comfort of traditional nu-metal; this is something Ill Nino and their like would find impressive.

The band’s love of hip hop and rap culture is the next thing to really cop a beating, on “Diamond Diez”, a track that starts out like a solid metalcore pit filler before devolving into some kind of braggadocios hip hop drivel that most listeners of heavy music will struggle to identify with in any kind of useful way.

The best track of the album is buried in the middle of the track list among more album filler hip hop turd. It is over in a relative flash but “Lost in Dayz…” presents all of the elements that make this band worth taking note of if they can reel back the hip hop stereotypes and knuckle down on the heavy hitting hardcore stuff. Its follow-up “Killing Alchemy” blends the elements completely in a way the UnityTX has attempted to do. Final track “World Of Malice” blows the doors off completely as vocalist Shaolin G turns in his heaviest performance with gusto.

This album is for fans of the nu-metal movement and hip hop. It is sold as something different and it certainly is that but for some listeners the swagger and cultural dynamic that goes with it will miss the mark completely.
Get Ferality on CD or vinyl