Within Temptation Song Meaning Detective Game:

    Normally, book blogs with a certain rank or reputation utilize contests to persuade more people to check out their blogs. Without any offense to these bloggers, I've always found contests to be something that cheapens the substance of a blog. Overall, I do completely understand both the necessity and purpose of these contests.

   By the way, if you are new visitor to this  or completely oblivious to the existence of Within Temptation. Let me refer you to this unearthed blog post from the past. Right now, I don't feel like dragging words together to summarize Within Temptation's creative sound. Long ago, I wrote a much better post that explained the band to the uninitiated.

  My form of contests do not involve  prizes or any sort of incentive. They are primarily modeled to persuade people to post comments on this blog rather than casually peruse it. More often than not, this blog does occasionally gain many views though there is no clear evidence of these views. People make visitations to this blog yet never really leave any comments within the "comment box."

  In order to involve more people on this blog by means of comments, I plan to have a Within Temptation Detective Game. The basic objective of this game is to form your own hypothetical meanings of the songs included on their newest album, "The Unforgiving," which will be released March 29th in the United States.

     Instead of slogging through a list of cryptic instructions, I'll be providing an example of my own ideas of the meanings behind the songs on Within Temptation's new album. Actually, I'm primarily doing this activity to overcome my writer's block that has been plaguing me for the past few days. Even right now, the easiest sentence seems to require deep concentration. Writer's block always feels like you are seeking out something in darkness that is nonexistent. So, writing this blog post feels like I'm pulling similar objects together to form something coherent or interesting.

Anyways here is my listing of the track titles on Within Temptation's new album along with my idea of their meaning..

1.     Why Not Me:
     What does this song title suggest? "Why not me?" seems to indicate that the character within the context of this song is ruminating over potential reasons as to why they are excluded from life itself. Or, within a respite from the incessant action of their life, they are offering the listeners of this album their justification for their detached existence. Potentially, they might be fabricating moral details of their life in order to distract us from the telltale signs that they are not highly moral. Instead, they may have even committed numerous crimes that are largely immoral. Yet, they brush those aside and convince the listener of their unnoticed innocence. Possibly, they might even use situational ethics to display their necessity for committing a certain crime to bring about rescue from their own perilous position.

If anything, this song seems to sound like a broadcast from the Joker who futilely tries to position themselves in a place of victim-hood: "Why not me?" he sardonically ask the listeners. "Why wouldn't I not commit those crimes? Does there have to be a structured system of morals in a world whose very creation lacked any known structure or order. Isn't the world morally ambiguous? Though, it  has a clever veneer of being moral according to our own devised moral system which is based solely on whatever ethical system we were indoctrinated into. Then again, don't most people create their own moral system to assuage their guilt or allow them to fulfill their own relative desires?

2.     Shot In The Dark
    Shot in the Dark typically describes the lonesome sound of alarm that rings out in the darkness of immorality. It is that one human scream that interrupts the violence of the feral growl of the gun.  After the speaker asserts their moral innocence within the last song. They transition into presenting their nightly routine to you. Again, from their perspective, we are under the potential false belief that they are morally immaculate. We believe that they are the sole persons who must reverse the cycle of nightly violence and bring justice into the immoral calamity.



3.     In The Middle Of The Night
   "In the Middle of the Night," relates to the second song specifically by bringing us to a sequence where the title character of the album  rushes to the scene where the gun shot originates from. As with reading books from the first-person perspective, we see the action mainly from the eyes of the main character. They keep denouncing our anxiety about them being an malicious person in reality.

Instead of mustering their strength to argue with us, they throw themselves into the action being played out at the scene of the violence.


4.     Faster
 Faster relates to the alacrity involved within the action of this scene. The background music in of itself propels the song forward to the main scene of confrontation with the perpetuation of the violence. Again, the main character's views may potentially be fallacious. As they are fighting fiercely with the criminal and trying to incapacitate them. We imbibe a sense of unsureness about the entire sequence: we do not effectively know if either people engaged in the present violence are purely innocent.

The main character could very well be unthinkingly involving themselves in violence due to the fast-paced action involve. With this rapid pace, they have no time to contemplate their motives or actions. Instead they can thrown themselves into the dizzying action and divest themselves of moral consideration.




5.     Fire And Ice


Pacifically, ice universally cools the senseless violence that is produced through both sides of a struggle.  It does not separate itself from the process of thoughtful consideration. Within the realm of the active, moral mind, it calculates every potential reason or justification for a person's intended actions. Then, it seeks out some area of neutrality. Mostly, the ice tries to assuage the vengeful feelings of all persons and seeks resolution between two forces of opposition.
6.     Iron
 Iron relates specifically to the discriminating force of malice. When violence is involved in anything, personal bias's intercedes on the potential actions of our force of reason. Instead of committing sensible actions that require patience and drawn-out calculation. Violence expediently subdues a particular foe that is a threat to our own personally designed world where we fashion the values and discriminatory measures.

Relating to the character of the song, maybe they've decided to designate certain people for violent encounters to escape the darkness of their own thoughts. Maybe, they cannot even penetrate their own minds due to the violence that has been wrought in their past. Therefore, without their explicit consent, their minds have blockaded the past and put up an impenetrable, iron defense around this pained mind.
7.     Where Is The Edge
Even with the creation of this mental fortress that divides us between our past and thoughtless present, some thoughts still trickle in.  We thought our lifestyle of justified violence or assassination secluded us from the menace of these thoughts. Yet, our consciences that we have tried so hard to repress seems to push forward some thoughts that stop us from being effective killers.

In the dwellings of our minds without moral definitions, we thought we would be exempt from bring hit full force by the train of our thoughts. During some moments of quietude, we thought we could focus solely on our next objective. We've tried and struggled hard to justify these actions. According to some source, these murders are a requisite part of maintaining justice in the world we think seems perpetually absent of goodness.

At the edge of our violent selves,can we even consider the possibility that our current lifestyle that seems inescapable may not be realistically justified?Could our supposed moral selves really be deceitful? In reality, we might even be inseparable from the immoral fiends that we vanquish on a nightly basis. The morals that we take for granted could very well be a defense mechanism that keeps us from free-falling into the chasm of meaninglessness.
8.     Sinéad
"Sinead," the identity the character owned during their past resurfaces. It seems that that mental fortress we thought was indomitable had the illusion of being so. Within the darkness of their dreams, the name "Sinead," was whispered carefully within their ears. Afterwords, the images flow through without stall. One moment before, the darkness overwhelmed their dreams. Soon enough though, the light being produced by these past images lighted up and became manifest.


9.     Lost
In these dreams, they are still not sure as to whether they really are "Sinead." Potentially, the neurons within our slumbering mind might be misfiring and triggering these false images. These dreams could be trying to grant us some suggestion that they once had purpose, symmetry, and reason to the lost rhythm of their life. Yet, the title character tries to eradicate these dreams stop them from reigning over the inertness of our sleeping state.

More than likely, they know implicitly that all these dreams if allowed to be recognized then acknowledged would show the error of their present. It would also show that their current lives was a method of escape from the unresolved matters of their life and the unforgivable moments  contained in those past memories. Instead, is it not better to disassociate one's identity from this dream and keep living the frenetic life of stopping the forces of evil within the dark underworld they currently inhabit.
10.   Murder
Suddenly, Sinead shows that one image that the main character had thought had been long buried. Yet, the image fills the darkness of their sleeping refuge. Since, the character is immobilized by sleep, they cannot actively recirculate their  thoughts and potentially rid themselves of this triggered memory.

Even so, the image overtakes and shows Sinead's murder. Strangely, she had been murdered by the very authorities who operated the company that had hired her for these nightly assignments of fighting supposed crime. Inexplicably, the forces thought they could engineer the souls of highly sensitive individuals and use their sensitivity to fight against the very forces who they identify as being enemies to the peace these individuals believe to be sacred.




11.   A Demon’s Fate

Our character of the album finally becomes accepting of their present status and their name "Sinead." With a name and acknowledgment of their captivity to this post-death delusion, they urge themselves to go after these manipulative forces. Sinead begins doubting her thoughts though because she does not know whether or not they can be trusted. Every element of her may have been carefully crafted to lend to her ability of being a successful murderer.

Suddenly, she recalls that all the enemies she had been fighting were not murderous foes. Conversely, they were individuals who were seeking to destroy the operatives of this false afterlife. The city that all these people inhabited had all died within the real world. Yet, they have now been snatched away from their automatic movements towards the unimagined, ineffable afterlife. Of course, there could very well be no afterlife. Maybe, their mortality was forcefully be extended through genetic manipulation or the introduction of synthetic, genetic mutations that allowed for immortality to take effect.
12.   Stairway To The Skies

Sinead  defeats the combative forces that she believed were heavenly hosts who offered her missions that would be used to eliminate evil. Instead, these forces had only identified something that was not evil as "evil," in order to preserve the fragile wasteland of their pretend afterlife.

All the test subjects who were unwillingly ensnared by this artificial afterlife begin to float away from their preserved, pallid corpses. Sinead begins to rise from her body and uses her formerly ignored mind. She reverently analyzes the genius of her consciousness and becomes fearful of the loss of this consciousness. On her Earth, before this, many people informed her that the belief within a continuation of life after death was a whimsical, illogical ideal.

Except, as Sinead faces her true death, she could not help but envision a comforting image of steep, white stairs that have arisen from the grimy grounds of this wrecked playground of an afterlife. Stepping upon the stairs, she wonders why she ever sought to ignore the device of the consciousness that was embedded in her minds by either spontaneous evolution over a series of years or by some superior creator. Walking up the stairs apprehensively, she recounts all her glorified moments of consciousness and climbs to the top of the stairway to this imagined heaven to find out if life is meaningless or not.