At this point, I can safely say the first half of Unia has grown on me. I think its biggest weakness is that it's so front-loaded; it starts off very strong and has all its best songs almost immediately, then seems to run out of steam for the second half. Of the first eight songs, everything except the seventh ("The Vice") has managed to grow beyond just being tracks on the CD and be impressive as actual stand-alone songs, in the way that most of Sonata Arctica's best work does. However, they start to get less interesting starting at track 9 ("The Harvest,") and continue to go downhill. Track 12 ("Fly with the Black Swan") is the most blatant forgettable filler track I've heard since "Picturing the Past" on Ecliptica. At least "Good Enough is Good Enough" is better and the "Out in the Fields" is pretty decent, so it doesn't end on such a bleak note, but it is kind of hard to listen to an entire album (which is what I like doing, rather than mixing them up on Pandora or something) when you think "Okay, that was the last good song, now for a half-hour or so of random junk...."

The weird thing is that filler tracks seem to be rare, at least for me. I mean, consider Avantasia's "The Metal Opera, Part II," which got heavily criticized for front-loading like that on account of putting the biggest masterpiece breakthrough track of the album (the 14-minute, most-of-cast-including, two-guitar-solo-having, wholly epic "The Seven Angels") as track 1. Sure, that may be hard to top, but I actually liked every song on that album on its own merit, so I'm consistently able to enjoy listening to the whole album in one sitting without thinking of any of it as filler. Unia, though...I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that "The Harvest" through "Fly with the Black Swan" are particularly weak for Sonata Arctica songs.