A couple years ago I reviewed Nemesea's sophmore album In Control, which was a decent yet flawed symphonic gothic album. There were some catchy melodies, and the vocals of singer Manda Ophuis worked well with the style. Unfortunately Nemesea have chosen a far less "metal" approach this time, focusing more on melody and catchiness than anything else, which wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing if they had one bit of originality. Unfortunately it doesn't work and the band mostly comes off sounding like Evanescence or Within Temptation wannabes.

Caught In The Middle starts off with synths and a poppy melody. The vocals of Manda Ophuis are still pretty good as before, but the music is really not original at all. It's like a cross between Within Temptation and Evanescence, but with hardly an ounce of creativity. Things continue in much the same direction with Afterlife. Generic melodic guitar riffs start the song off with the soft vocals of Ophuis and some weak synths. The chorus is extremely poppy once again, not sounding like gothic metal one bit. The lyrics are also nonsense for the most part. Whenever also relies heavily on a melodic chorus with heavy guitars. Besides the guitars in the chorus there is hardly anything resembling rock or metal in this song. I hesitated to even mention If You Could, but it is such a weak ballad in every way I felt it only fair to caution those considering listening to this album - just save 4 minutes of your life and skip this track. High Enough is not much better. The verse completely lacks energy of any kind, it's basically exactly the same formula as Whenever a few tracks back.

Unfortunately this album does not improve at all from there. The songs continue to follow this pattern of slow to mid-paced verses with an attempt to create a heavier, catchy chorus. That's all there is over and over again, with the occasional boring ballad thrown in. It's Over even adds insult to injury by ineptly bringing in turntable sounds and auto-tune nonsense. After listening to this album twice I struggled to put it back on because it just felt like such a waste of time. Needless to say there is almost nothing about this album to like. The vocals aren't bad, but the music and songwriting is so pathetic that I can hardly believe a label would want to release it. Definitely a candidate for the worst album I've heard this year.