Talking Heads: Within Temptation Baffles with Hydra

I’ve learned through these past few years doing The Metal Pigeon that the hardest reviews to write are the ones for releases that I don’t feel strongly about one way or another. Case in point is the amount of days I’ve been putting off publishing this review for the newest Within Temptation album, Hydra, simply because I’ve felt unsatisfied about my own written response (I’ve re-written this thing about three times now, and this fourth and final time is me just being blunt and hopefully not coming across as a jerk). Full disclosure before I begin: I generally enjoy what Within Temptation does —- which is polished, semi-symphonic metallic pop-rock crowned with the ear pleasing vocals of Sharon Den Adel. There have been some missteps along the way (the insipid “What’ve You Done Now?” duet with Keith Caputo comes to mind), but generally speaking Within Temptation have done rather well in their chosen style. I’ve never really considered them a metal band, but they get thrown into our world due to the semi-doom stylings of their debut album and simply by association (at least for me… I first heard of them through Den Adel’s guest spot on the first Avantasia album). But that’s okay, because over the past decade plus they’ve delivered a handful of albums with catchy, well crafted songs that ring with conviction.

 

This however, is not one of those albums. Within Temptation have always possessed a commercially friendly sound, but on albums like Mother Earth (2000), its follow up The Silent Force (2004), and the surprisingly excellent The Unforgiving (2011), that characteristic seemed like a natural byproduct of the band’s songwriting ability to use dramatic, epic sound palettes in crafting self contained pop format songs. Den Adel’s vocal melodies were central in importance, while the riffs and orchestral arrangements would work to support them by encapsulating them (for example on tracks like “Stand My Ground”, or “Angels”). Of course the caveat here is that such a strategy only worked as long as the vocal melodies were strong enough to carry the song alone —- and on those records, they generally were. When the band gets it wrong, as on The Heart of Everything (2007) and yes, on Hydra, the results are largely uninspiring. Compound this with a series of misguided guest vocalist additions and you have a near disaster of an album.

 

Let’s start with those questionable guest vocalists first. I remember feeling mildly concerned that their usage of the aforementioned Caputo as a guest vocalist on The Heart of Everything would mark the start of a potentially negative trend, but surprisingly The Unforgiving was guest-free. I guess they’re making up for the lack thereof on that album becauseHydraboasts an unseemly four guest singers, none of whom on paper inspire confidence. The results are worse on record —- where to start? Let’s take “And We Run”, a song where a promising verse really needs an actual developed bridge to the Den Adel sung chorus, but I suppose that’s rapper Xzibit’s job, with his post chorus raps full of nonsensical lyrics and atonal delivery that completely derail any hope of this being a good song. Its one of those songs where you wonder if someone in the recording process or mixing phase was silently thinking to themselves, “I think this should be a b-side”. Not faring much better is the lame “Dangerous”, where ex-Killswitch Engage screamer Howard Jones gives us his best alternative rock voice, which is a shade more tolerable than his regular style. The song itself seems to have the potential to be something decent, the vocal melody is salvageable, but its marred by clumsy, embarrassingly bad lyrics.

 

And then there’s the much ballyhooed Tarja Turunen (billed these days simply as “Tarja”) collaboration, “Paradise (What About Us)”, a song that is disappointing on a few levels. First I suppose I should remark on just how well Tarja’s English pronunciations sound these days, to the untrained ear her traded off verses with Den Adel would be nearly indistinguishable. That’s also part of the problem —- their verses are patterned so similarly that there really isn’t an apparent juxtaposition of voices on the song (unless you count Tarja’s operatic accents during the middle bridge section —- which I don’t). Songwriting wise, there’s some solid rhythmic variations going on in the verse sections that you wish were expanded upon. It’s the chorus that fails me, not only because its repeated countless times in favor of… you know, actual songwriting variations, but its simply weak, unable to pull sufficiently from the wellspring of drama that has fueled so many Within Temptation choruses past. To me personally, its yet another sad piece of proof that Tarja’s vocals will never have the benefit of the kind of songwriting platforms Tuomas Holopainen crafted for her in Nightwish —- she simply does not sound good anywhere else.

 

The only guest vocalist spot that sort of works, and that’s primarily due to the strength of the song, is Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner on “The Whole World is Watching”, of which I still can’t believe no one representing the band didn’t try to get on NBC during the Sochi Olympics. Do I have to draw you guys a picture? Despite its maudlin lyrics, this is one of the stronger songs on the record as an above average ballad, but I suppose that depends on your tolerance level for these things. Pirner has always been a rather expressive singer (certainly among most of the Minneapolis rock bands of that era), but just like the other guests he’s a puzzling choice for co-vocalist, albeit one of the more believable ones. I suppose I can see a younger Within Temptation enjoying “Runaway Train” back in the day, but wasn’t there someone with a far more distinctive and powerful voice they could’ve called upon? And I wonder why all the increased emphasis on guest vocalists all of a sudden anyway? A cynical perspective would highlight them as examples of a band wanting to trade in on a guest vocalist’s fan base, but only in the case of Tarja is that really a potential reality here. I’m baffled honestly.

 

Thankfully its not all bad. The album opener “Let It Burn” is a decent song, reminiscent of the same surging energy that ran throughout The Unforgiving, with tension building verses that explode in a exuberant refrain. The highlight of the album however is “Silver Moonlight”, the one track that sees the band refreshingly reconnecting with their metallic roots. There are actual metal riffs at work here! Some pretty good ones at that, making a change from what has become the band’s typical reliance on big dumb power chords. Here Sharon Den Adel flexes her soaring vocals to greater heights, and guitarist Robert Westerholt makes his co-vocalist return with some impressively doomy death vocals. Ironic that this ends up being the best track on an album full of guest vocalists. There’s also “Covered By Roses”, where the Gothic imagery of the title is matched by the content of the lyrics, full of references to castles, falling stars, wine, sadness, beauty —- it winds up sounding like an outtake from The Silent Force (that’s a good thing). Is that an actual fluid guitar solo I hear at the end there? I knew these guys still had some real musicality hiding under all these layers of production gloss! On an album this dire, I’ll take every encouraging sign I can get. I could’ve done without the awkward, half-baked “Dog Days”, a song that might’ve benefited from a producer who would’ve called the terrible lyrics into question. Oh well… I’m getting tired of listening to this record honestly, so moving on.

 

There’s a bonus disc on some editions of Hydra that contain a handful of covers taken from the band’s questionable The Q-Music Sessions (see Wikipedia for more info on this), and some “evolution” tracks of songs from the album (essentially, gradual fades of demos to finished versions). I just want to focus on the idea of these covers here, let’s see: Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive”, Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness”, Enrique Iglesias’ “Dirty Dancer”, and Passenger’s “Let Her Go”. Both “Dirty Dancer” and “Radioactive” sound silly, they’re completely divorced from their original sound palette and while that was the point —- flatly I find them unlikeable. Faring little better is “Summertime Sadness”, as the upbeat Goth-rock orchestral arrangement conjured up for the cover is an inadequate backdrop when compared to the original’s eerie, smoky trip-hop palette. Much better by far is the band’s take on Passenger’s “Let Her Go”, and yes the lyrics are strange when sung by a woman, though Den Adel’s vocals are far superior to Mike Rosenberg’s. Something strikes me as odd about the inclusion of these four tracks as bonus cuts. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I’m not surprised that three of them are very recent hits… and major major hits at that (I’m talking Lebron jamming to his Beats headphones type of hits). And they’re being re-re-released here for emphasis.

 

I know the intention behind The Q-Music Sessions was to celebrate a radio station’s anniversary (huh?!) and to see if the band could quickly adapt a song to their style —- however, the entire affair struck me at the time as the most dubious exercise in crass commercialism. What’s even more surprising was the lack of anyone calling them out on it. I have no problem with a band wanting to get bigger, to sell more records, to gain more fans, and to generally secure their livelihood. I do feel however, that what Within Temptation have done by agreeing to the concept of their stunt with this radio station is inherently disingenuous. They’re not releasing a covers record of songs culled from their influences growing up, they’re simply covering pop radio hits. Was it really such a challenge to deliver such half-baked covers? When they released all these finished covers as an album, the YouTube uploads quickly followed —- you can’t say the band isn’t shrewd. How many of those covered artists’ fans have checked out these YouTube-d covers by this odd Dutch rock band? How many of those fans will in turn check out Hydra due to simple fandom flattery? How far does something like this go you may ask? Den Adel even recently appeared on a European chat show with a bewildered looking Lana Del Rey. Crossover indeed.

14 Comments

  1. Robert Brooks
    February 26, 2014

    ” Howard Jones gives us his best alternative rock voice, which is a shade more tolerable than his regular style. The song itself seems to have the potential to be something decent, the vocal melody is salvageable, but its marred by clumsy, embarrassingly bad lyrics.”….I think that qualifies it as an immediate top ten hit on the American Top 40.
    I used like WT. I don’t where it all started going wrong for me, but it did. Maybe it was the Caputo duet. Maybe It was whole damned album. I got through 2 songs on Hydra before I switched to random. 3/10 for me.

    Reply
    1. The Metal Pigeon
      February 26, 2014

      The Caputo duet struck me at the time as being their answer to Evanescence’s big hit three years earlier, which was disappointing in its very suggestion. Within Temptation was doing fine without needing to succumb to such outside pressures, but it was the first instance of the band being reactionary. The idea being that oh, we should create our own beauty and the beast duet to try to reach out towards American radio —- it actually even sounded like the Evanescence song, with Caputo’s “what have you done now?!” shout sounding near similar in tone and delivery to Paul McCoy’s “wake me up!”. But it actually worked as far as getting them on American radio so what do I know.

      Reply
      1. Jay N
        July 25, 2015

        You can’t compare Evanescence and WT ! and of course within temptation weren’t reacting to a song for Eva! Lol What have you done now is an amazing song, perfect in its own style.

        Reply
  2. Eric
    February 26, 2014

    I don’t know, some things I agree with you about, others I don’t. Personally, I liked the duet with Keith Caputo but that’s just me. As far as Hydra goes, other than the song with Tarja (which I also liked), I’ve only heard like 1 minute snippets on ITunes but what I heard I definitely didn’t like. They’ve always been a commercial sounding band and I don’t begrudge them for trying to make a living but this does just sound like a blatant attempt to appeal to as many people as possible. The pop cover songs don’t help either. Although I did like their version of “Grenade” by Bruno Mars.

    Reply
    1. The Metal Pigeon
      February 26, 2014

      To me the guest vocalist choices were puzzling in themselves… Howard Jones, xzibit, Dave Pirner? Really? Tarja I could understand, but its a paper thin veneer through which you can see the motive behind having her on board —- it was BIG news and made a lot of fanboys/girls happy. Smart PR move, but I don’t feel she added anything to the song.

      The cover songs on the other hand…. I know I’m picking a fight with their diehards by even going after them, but I just don’t see how they can be justified. Its sheer crass commercialism.

      Reply
  3. Eric
    February 26, 2014

    Tarja didn’t necessarily add anything to the song but I think it’s one of the better songs on Hydra. Totally agree that the cover songs was a move of sheer crass commercialism. This may backfire against them though. They’ll gain new fans but lose the hardcore old ones who will say they’ve sold out. Remember the backlash against Metallica when they cut their hair and released “Load”? Obviously, they want to expose themselves to as large an audience as possible.

    Reply
    1. The Metal Pigeon
      February 26, 2014

      The Metallica comparison may not be a perfect 1-to1 analogy here, but I get your meaning. I would actually offer that Load is a slightly more difficult album as a whole to get into than The Black Album was. Personally I’ve never really seen Metallica as selling out at any point in their career, but their rise to the mainstream was seemingly (and maybe retrospectively) inevitable. To follow Master of Puppets, a rather accessible thrash record with the inaccessibility of Justice was not a commercial move, but recording a music video was. Reacting to the excess of Justice with the simplification of The Black Album was far more reactionary than most people would like to admit. Load on the other hand I feel was far more provoking than anything —- had they really intended to sell out, they would have made The Black Album part 2. Load sold far less than The Black Album. That being said, they didn’t help themselves by reveling in GQ quality photoshoots in Spanish styled villas for the album jacket.

      Reply
  4. L Roy
    February 27, 2014

    Bonus points to you, Pidge, for not singing the praises of ‘THOE’. Have an extra point for finding Load an interesting release (when I listen to S&M, as I still do every now and again, the songs that worked best were from Load) =P Anyhow, I digress…

    In reference to their Evanescence moment, I actually posit that ‘Stand My Ground’ was their response to Evanescence’s ‘Bring me to Life; (hell, even the video clip for it was shot on top of a building whilst the weather turns for the worst). ‘What have you done’ felt more, to me, like a rushed follow up – a Mark II of their big single, so to speak – to try and keep the attention of the casual, radio listening fans. If ‘Faster’ was the next album’s (The Unforgiving) commercial success, then ‘Paradise’ is Hydra’s Mark II version of it; structurally its identical to ‘Faster’ and in concept its identical to ‘What have you done’ by adding the guest vocalist to mask the rehash.

    Given Westerholt is no longer touring due to assuming full time parent duties for his and den Adel’s third child, Hydra screams rushed follow up to The Unforgiving – an attempt to keep the band commercially relevant until they regroup.

    Reply
  5. Eric
    February 27, 2014

    I liked “Stand My Ground”, it had a great chorus and was very catchy. Not much on Hydra other than the duet with Tarja seemed to stick in my head.

    Reply
  6. Jay N
    July 25, 2015

    It seems that you are only giving your personal opinion about the album and the band. & you may be one of those narrow minded metal listeners who just want to stay on the same style forever. However, as a within temptation fan, I would say that this album was a bit disappointing at first, but after listening to it over and over again, I realized that the band actually developed its sound to the better! The drums and guitars are the best on this album in comparison to their old ones. You forgot to mention that mostly every song included a solo and the guitars were awesome. The solo on “Tell me why” for example. & if you wanna talk about the duet between Sharon and Tarja, well that’s right, I personally expected explosive vocals in a song featuring the best 2 female vocalists in metal. But Sharon’s voice was great on songs like edge of the world, and we run, silver moonlight. Anyways, it is nice to experiment new elements on every album, and in my opinion the next album will be their best, as Sharon said, it will be more symphonic, so I suppose that mixing the awesome guitar and drums from this album with more symphonies and dark lyrics in the next album will be a masterpiece.

    Reply
    1. The Metal Pigeon
      July 25, 2015

      Hello, thanks for reading and commenting! Haven’t listened to this album since shortly after this review went up way back in the early part of the year so it would be difficult for me to discuss specifics at the moment. You are correct in identifying that I am giving my personal opinion about the album in this review (the tagline of this blog is “Commentaries and Opinions on Metal”), because I don’t know any other way to write about music that isn’t such. Music reviews are by nature opinion pieces, because how can one be objective about music? Its a subjective experience.

      Not trying to come off as pedantic, but I can sense your frustration with what I wrote about the album and I understand to a certain extent —- nothing used to tick me off quicker than reading some half-baked review in Rolling Stone or Spin magazine about a metal album that was just the usual sneering, sarcastic series of jabs and attacks upon the genre as a whole. That being said, I tried to qualify why I felt Hydra wasn’t a good album with specific examples and context. I quite enjoy the large majority of Within Temptation’s work but as one commenter said above this album felt like a rush job, with not enough time spent on the songwriting and too many flashy guest vocalists that added nothing to the end result (aside from “The Whole World is Watching” which was pretty good).

      As for me being a close minded metal fan, if you take a look at the artists covered on this blog you’ll see that I run the gamut from a wide variety of subgenres —- I just reviewed a Cradle of Filth album right after a Reviews Cluster feature that had nothing but power metal bands. I listen to and try to write about a spectrum of metal. You’re right, bands do change and progress, sometimes consciously and other times without them even realizing it (a change that comes with age for example). Within Temptation have changed at times, not as much as others perhaps. I don’t view this new album as their foray into musical growth and exploration, I view it as a distraction packed album of half baked songs to release in time for a year or so or touring —- this is a band that has a formula and sticks to it, its just that this time they added on too many bells and whistles. They’re good at writing catchy metallic pop-rock songs that tend to stick in your head if the songwriting is good enough. This time it wasn’t. They’ll probably get it right next time.

      Reply
      1. Jay N
        July 26, 2015

        seriously ? metallic pop-rock songs? I bet you only few songs for this band. They’re very good at writing metal songs, how about Enter, Gatekeeper, the truth beneath the rose, hand of sorrow, mother earth, and the list goes on. I agree with one thing that some of their songs are simple with no deep lyrics, maybe it’s on purpose though.
        thanks for replying.

        Reply
        1. The Metal Pigeon
          July 26, 2015

          You’re citing a lot of examples from their early records… the reality is that Within Temptation is the poster child for a phrase like “metallic pop-rock”. Honestly, I don’t see that description as a negative one, its simply what they are. There’s nothing wrong with it. Again I’ll reiterate, I quite enjoy the majority of Within Temptation’s music, particularly when its catchy and poppy!

          Reply
  7. Former WT Fan
    September 30, 2018

    I have to disagree with your assessment of “The Unforgiving”; it was a pop snoozefest for me. That one and “Hydra” did in Within Temptation.

    Today I gave them a last chance and checked out the music video from the new album (“Rebel,” if I remember the name correctly?), but it’s more of the same. I’ll stick to “Enter,” “The Dance,” “Mother Earth” and “The Silent Force”; otherwise, WT are dead to me. Indeed they are, as you put it in a comment above, poster children for metallic pop-rock, which isn’t my thing.

    And oh, for a review of a symphonic metal(-ish?) band that DOESN’T mention Nightwish…! I cringe every time that happens. Tarja got my attention when she went solo. Prior to that, she was just another part of a band I’m sick of reading about. I think you underestimate her a bit. But more to the point, I’d love to read a review about a symphonic metal album where the N-word (so to speak) isn’t dropped. To hell with Nightwish!

    Reply

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