EMOTIONAL WASTELAND

Unicorn is another one of swedish musician and producer Dan Swanö´s projects. Dan Swanö has played with many mostly metal orientated bands through the years ( Edge of Sanity, Bloodbath, Maceration, Katatonia), but he has never made it a secret that he loves classic prog rock and especially neo prog like Marillion and IQ. His band Nightingale makes a very nice kind of prog rock/ soft metal, very melodic and with Dan´s beautiful voice omnipresent. Unicorn is in the vein of Nightingale without reaching the good level of that band.

Unicorn plays some very poppy neo prog rock, with surprisingly weak melodies. The instrumentation is also very weak and to top it off the production isn´t too good either. I must say that I am surprised by this very weak effort from Dan Swanö as we´re used to much better things from him. This is really lame.

I am tempted to give this album 1 star, but on the other hand there are some nice moments and the album isn´t a complete failure. I will not listen to this again though. Fans of light neo prog rock might find this exciting, but I doubt it. 2 small stars for a forgettable album. What a let down. Listen to Dan Swanö´s work with Nightingale instead, it´s much better and deserves more attention than it gets.