Within Temptation – Paradise (What About Us?) (2013)

Being huge fans of the band’s earlier material from their “Enter” and “The Dance” days, we constantly grew apart from their Pop-ish music over the last few years. While they have some great songs here and there, most of their ‘mainstream’ recent music has not impressed us much. Well, with the EP “Paradise (What About Us?)” we are quite surprised that the band returns to some of their earlier foundations (“Mother Earth”) and delivers quite an excellent short release.

The immediate standout is the EP’s title-track, featuring an amazing duet with none other than Tarja Turunen. In this high-intensity tune the band busts out the heavy distorted guitars and excellent atmospheric arrangements. Both Sharon and Tarja do an excellent job in this track making it quite dramatic and intense. The music is nowhere near as Pop-ish as bands like Amaranthe, making us quite enjoy this song. With the remaining tracks being demo versions, we still stand to see how much they change for the actual album, but for now we will focus on how good they are.

“Let Us Burn” has some great vocal arrangements and interesting tempo changes, making the song catchy but not overly dumbed down. We particularly love the enthusiastic keyboards and melodic riffs. Taken a turn for the dramatic, “Silver Moonlight” is quite mellow and enjoyable. Some of the riffs and passages remind us a bit of the “Mother Earth” times from the band. Heck, this track even has some growls thrown into the mix!

Closing the release we have another heavy hitter with “Dog Days”. More catchy vocal melodies and choruses make this song the second best of the EP. Overall, Within Temptation has come a long way over the years, and on this release they manage to bring back some of the older stuff. We instantly loved the song with Tarja, but all other songs show great potential and less Pop-ish stuff. Any fan or collector from this band should definitely get this release since it is quite entertaining and engaging.

Label: Nuclear Blast Records

Release: September 27th, 2013

Genre: Symphonic/Gothic Rock/Metal

Country: The Netherlands