Within Temptation – The Unforgiving (2011)

After all the selling out the band has done over the years and Sharon doing songs with Armin Van Buuren, I personally wanted to listen to this album to see how the band would keep their Metal fans, but still pushed forward with a more ‘commercially friendly’ sound.

With the first single, “Faster”, the band was on way to a completely disastrous album in my opinion since this song is another ‘dance’ anthem with catchy electronic elements and chorus sections. The rest of the album however, is a very different story. While there are obviously ‘pop-ish’ elements in this release, there are also many more elements of “Mother Earth” and “The Silent Force”, than in the band’s last shit-sandwich “The Heart of Everything” release.

For example, ballads like “Fire and Ice”, show traditional Within Temptation moments of pure emotion, solid orchestration, and almost no extreme commercial elements. In “Iron” we have a very powerful song with nice guitars that would still appeal to Metal fans and older fans of the band, no electronic elements bull-shit and such. “Where is the Edge” was the second song released in the “Faster” single, and as you can hear it has electronic elements and the guitars sound a bit watered down in the mix to be ‘less aggressive’ than in other tracks. The vocal processing is completely ridiculous and made me throw-up in my mouth a bit, but then I remembered is Within Temptation we are talking about (and I don’t mean this in the best of senses).

While the album has many ‘catchy’ songs, the approach of ‘pop-ish’ Metal songs surrounded by ballads and a few actual Symphonic/Gothic Metal songs, seems to be trying to cater to everybody to boost sales. Don’t get us wrong, there are some decent songs in this release and not everything is terrible. The band knows how to write good songs and create very elaborate compositions.

“The Unforgiving” is actually a pretty solid album, while the band is nothing like the band I loved with “Enter” and “The Dance”, they are still a pretty good band and Sharon is a great singer. The overall concept of the release is kind of cool and the music is very solid, the ‘commercial’ elements kind of kill some of the magic for me, but it is still a pretty good album, so definitely check it out.

Release: March 25th, 2011

Country: Netherlands