Within Temptation – “The Unforgiving” [Album Review]

To survive in the music scene you need to be original; you need to find ways to make your music be more than just a collection of songs packaged on a disc. With this said, Within Temptation has written an album which offers 12 tracks that follow the story of a comic series and three short films entitled entitled The Unforgiving. This is an amazing and exciting concept, but for now we’ll focus on the music.

As told by the band, the story is about: “A powerful medium, Mother Maiden recruits lost souls to be part of her wraith taskforce to fight evil in all its forms. They each carry a specific guilt about something they did in their lives. Mother Maiden offers them an opportunity to “make right what is wrong” by giving them missions and assignments to hunt down evil as a penance for their previous sins.”

The album displays the comic book art styles of Romano Molenaar (Witchblade, Darkness and X-men) which makes for a nice, dark mood. Surprisingly however, one will find the music’s vibes are very different from past Within Temptation work as they’ve taken their symphonic metal sound and layered in a bit of a pop vibe within the vocal lines. This change is positive and allows for each song to get stuck in your head. Moreover, the orchestral work found on the album is also impressive.

This is a neat concept for an album. To take on the story of a comic, especially one from the great Steven O’Connell (BloodRayne & Dark 48), is just plain cool. I’m interested in checking out the rest of the story as I really enjoyed The Unforgiving.

Track Listing:

01. Why Not Me
02. Shot In The Dark
03. In the Middle Of The Night
04. Faster
05. Fire And Ice
06. Iron
07. Where Is The Edge
08. Sinéad
09. Lost
10. Murder
11. A Demon’s Fate
12. Stairway To The Skies

Run Time: 53:42
Release Date: March 30, 2011

Check out the song: “Faster”