By Greg Pratt

Me and UNEARTH, we don’t have the smoothest history. Back in 2004, I gave their The Oncoming Storm CD a lukewarm, at best, review for this very publication; during an interview shortly after that, the band called me out and said they should just change their sound to whatever it is I want to hear. (Disappointingly, they didn’t.)

But here we are, all these years later, and I wrangle up vocalist Trevor Phipps to tell him that his band has finally put out a record I like. It’s taken a long time—Darkness In The Light, their new one, is their fifth album—but they’ve done it.

“That’s really funny,” says Phipps, trying to remember which member of the band it was who gave the interview in question to Brave Words. “I have a feeling it might be [guitarist] Ken [Susi]. He gets very upset when we get not-so-great feedback (laughs). Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. It’s music, it’s art; people are entitled to not like what you’re doing. Just relax (laughs). That was seven years ago; I’ve chilled out since then about stuff like that.”

So, Unearth vs. Greg Pratt comes to an end, in the best of possible ways: Unearth make new album which makes Pratt bang his head and tell band members they’ve done good.

“Awesome,” says Phipps. “I appreciate it, man. Thank you. Each time you do a record you get so emotionally involved in it that you think it’s your best. I still think that perhaps Storm was our strongest. But this one, we added something to it.”

Phipps pulls out the old cliché that the intention was to combine elements of all the band’s albums in this new one, and it’s true: it’s all here, and maybe that’s why it took Unearth so long to create an album that isn’t lacking in some way. They had to get all the pieces ready first, and then they put them all together.

“Each of the first four albums offers something different,” says Phipps. “There was the youthful energy from our first one, The Stings of Conscience; Storm has some more melodic moments, but also some really heavy crushing breakdowns. Then we had the speed with In The Eyes Of Fire; that was lacking on The March, on purpose, and there were songs on this record that had the groove of The March. We wanted this record to have more solos, better melodic riffs, but to also keep it heavy and aggressive.”

The problem with the new album, as I explain to Phipps (diplomatically, trying to not re-sever the newly formed Pratt/Unearth ties), isn’t so much the band’s fault as it is the fault of the countless bands that play a similar style of hardcore/metal, a sound that, since Unearth’s formation, has become extremely tired. But on this new album, the band sets themselves apart from the rest, and they do it in a very natural-sounding way.

“You do that by writing the catchiest, best songs you can,” he says. “We can’t change our style to do something we’re not inspired by. We can’t go changing our sound because there are a bunch of bands that have copied us. I think the bands that start a sound are the ones that do it best. After Slayer came out, there were thousands of bands that sound like Slayer. Now there’s just Slayer.”

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