The Unforgiving

Within Temptation's new album The Unforgiving came out on Tuesday but I haven't had the time to swing by a store and pick it up. I don't want to buy the whole album from iTunes - although there are 3 songs that are only available from iTunes...go figure - because I want the 2-disc special edition CD-DVD combo. I can't stop listening to the album on YouTube though (LOVE the "queue" option!) and this song is my favorite song so far, luckily it comes with a music video :D

"Sinéad"

Notice the drummer with the mask? He's not shy, the reason for the "annonymity" is here:

haha, "they'd to blow me away to get rid of me"!

*NEW STUFF!
Okay, so I went out and bought the album... heheh, a couple weeks ago now... but have just been a little slowww on the uptake, err, update.

To summarize: I LOVE IT.

To expand: A lot of artists end up taking a leap of faith by creating a concept album and while I personally don't mind concept albums, I've read enough reviews to gather that a lot of people don't. According to my pal Wiki P. Edia, a concept album is defined as an album that is: "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical"...with "all songs contributing to a single overall theme or unified story."

Oftentimes concept albums are attributed to the prog rock genre of the 70s, the most famous of which is Pink Floyds' The Dark Side of the Moon, but I've also heard the same said about Muses' The Resistance. Alas! This is the problem with definitions and 'defining' and 'categorizing' things (even MORE problematique... problematic, just kiddin'... when it comes to people), very few things ever fit snugly into their definitions.

So, to use Muse as an example, (not because I've been researching them for 4 years or anything... and I so DO NOT have a MuseWiki account... ok, I do) if The Resistance was "unified" by the idea of rising up against oppression both of a political and a personal nature, then couldn't it also be said that Black Holes and Revelations was unified by political messages and science fiction undertones about corrupt governments and conspiracy theories, and in a similar vein, that Absolution could be unified by its themes of fear, mistrust, the end of the world and spiritual forgiveness? Matt was quoted as saying the beginnings of the Iraq War had an effect on the songwriting for Absolution...
(Fun fact: BH and R was partially recorded in the same studio as Pink Floyds' The Wall)

LOL, what was my tangent again???

That's right, concept albums! Okay, so The Unforgiving was released alongside a comic book and a series of short films around a concept story. Here's a series of quotes from front-woman, Sharon den Adel:

"What happened was that we wanted to write lyrics for a movie. We were searching for a good movie with a good story and everybody had different release dates. If something goes wrong, a movie can very easily be postponed for a year, and we couldn't take the chance to have to wait for that, otherwise we would have had to postpone our album as well. So we decided to take the matter in our own hands. 

"We told him what kind of movies we liked, what kind of books we read, and he thought about it and he came up with a basic idea, like 2 or 3 lines. The story is about people who have done bad things. Not because they are bad, but because they made bad decisions.

"...we wanted to put all the money into the movies. You have a budget and then you have to make choices and, to be honest, MTV and everything, it is not so big anymore. And when you make videos, they always say "you can't use blood, you can't use guns, you can't use..." and we wanted to use everything: blood, guns... everything!" 

The bonus about buying the CD/DVD is that you get the videos and music videos (not that you can't find everything on YouTube anyways...). The comic book, which is also called The Unforgiving, was written by Steven O'Connell (BloodRayne and Dark 48) and illustrated by Romano Molenaar (Witchblade, The Darkness and X-Men).

My fav songs, in addition to Sinéad, are Faster, Shot in the Dark and...

lol, I have to go find my list again *fail* XD

I just put the album on repeat and listened to it for 2 weeks solid but I failed learn the song titles! I'll have to go back and listen to them :DD