Band:	Unexpect
Album:	Fables Of The Sleepless Empire
Style:	Extreme avantgarde metal
Release date:	May 2011

01. Unsolved Ideas Of A Distorted Guest
02. Words
03. Orange Vigilantes
04. Mechanical Phoenix
05. The Quantum Symphony
06. Unfed Pendulum
07. In The Mind Of The Last Whale
08. Silence This Parasite
09. A Fading Stance
10. When The Joyful Dead Are Dancing
11. Until Yet A Few More Deaths Do Us Part

It seems like more often than not whenever the band Unexpect is brought up or I share a song from the band that I always seem to get a lot of the same responses; "It's too random and disjointed" or, since we're on the internet, a blatant "THAT WAS SHIT". For quite a while now I haven't been able to wrap my head around why Unexpect would be seen so negatively by metalheads. I remember one person saying something to the effect of "metal written by insane asylum patients" and my immediate thought is "well that sounds pretty damn metal."

Looking back on it now, Fables Of The Sleepless Empire does get a bit chaotic at times. Perhaps it's just my affinity for avantgarde metal that kept me from seeing it fully like others seem to, or maybe it's something else. I pondered it in my mind for a while and came to the conclusion that maybe i just love chaos. It's like you're in school and your art teacher hands you a canvas, a brush and a pallet and tells you to paint something. Most people might have painted a cat or a nice landscape, but I'd imagine if Unexpect were the ones holding the brush they would throw the brush at the teacher tell her to go fuck herself and proceed to smack their hands down on the pallet splattering bits of color on the teacher's now awe struck face and then beat the ever loving crap out of the canvas. The end result would look much like a mess to most, but others could see something more in it; a sort of imagination that lay outside of convention.

Also, the beating the crap out of the canvas thing would be totally metal, and I'm all for that.

So, what about the music then? The songs themselves do have a lot of jumping from one sound to the next in a very disconnected way. One moment you'll have some keyboards playing and clean female vocals and then everything halts for a split second and it's death growls and crunchy riffs. As a result the music is unpredictable, which is nice, but the songs themselves are extremely unmemorable because the album as a whole comes at you as a barrage of short moments; a convoluted, chaotic mess of sound. It feels like any hooks in this album are buried within that mess. If that's what you're into then I say go for it, but otherwise you'll probably want to pass on this one. Even to the crowd this type of music may appeal to I can't see it being more than a slightly above average experience. Interesting enough for a few listens but not memorable enough to want to play it over and over and over again. I, for one, respect Unexpect's unorthodox approach and will continue to support them whilst telling haters to go fuck themselves so I can get back to beating on my canvas.