Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Unreqvited - A Pathway to the Moon (2025)

Very much a tale of two different listening experiences in the same week, A Pathway to the Moon has had a bumpy old ride with me this week.  The first run through was as a result of a late night exploration of new releases on Spotify as I struggled to sleep in a hotel.  In that scenario the rich tapestry of melodic guitars and gazey vocals, soothed my soul sufficiently to send me off on a peaceful sleep.  By no means a backhanded compliment to Unreqvited, this was a good first experience in that particular circumstance.  The second listen through was done in the car driving along a picturesque section of motorway in the north of England.  Again, this was a positive experience. The lushious instrumentation was the perfect accompaniment to the rolling hills of the landscape I was passing through.  My thoughts turned to listening experiences with the likes of Saor as those soaring leads and expansive soundscapes took me back to my early explorations of that group.  It is rare that I find myself being able to make such a connection between my surroundings and the music in my ears at the time, let alone find an album to be so endearing to me under two very different scenarios.

I know what you are thinking now, dear reader.  Why is this rating showing a paltry 2.5 stars if he loves it so much?  The fact is, outside of sleep impaired lucidity and breathtaking scenery, A Pathway to the Moon is repetitive to the point of being boring.  When listened to in the isolation of trying to appreciate the actual album content it is hard not to feel cheated in that the same ideas are just being repeated over and over again.  Tracks more or less are just built the same, using the same notes it sounds like, and as much as I cannot deny that this is really well performed stuff, clearly written by a very capable artist, the performance level is marred by the lack of variation in style.  There is, of course, something to be said for establishing a blueprint and sticking to it.  However, truly great albums need to work at a very basic level first of all.  Before A Pathway to the Moon can be (correctly) acknowledged for its ability to work in the tenderer moments of one's surroundings it needs to be putting down roots, and unfortunately there is little to get entangled with when you look past the aesthetics of the album.     

The overall experience is a little akin to meeting someone whom you believe at first engagement to be really exciting or possessing a large degre of intrigue about their character, only to find after a few minutes that they are just regurgitating the same script that is clearly well rehearsed.  Whilst I cannot go as far as to say Unreqvited are a fake, the interest levels lack much in the way of magnetism to truly keep them an interesting concept.