Pain of Salvation, redeeming themselves?
In late 2009, Pain of Salvation released an EP, Linoleum. On it is four songs from their newest album coming out sometime this year, Road Salt. I can happily say that they are starting to redeem themselves, at least to me. Okay, chances are, you probably don’t know of the band. That’s fine, I’ll explain my love-hate relationship with their music.
Well, basically, Pain of Salvation had an amazing first four albums, and two of them in particular, The Perfect Element and Remedy Lane were great works. Yes, like many prog bands, pretentiousness was there, but there was great beauty and emotion in not only the lyrics, but the music as well. Had these four albums been the only to exist, I probably wouldn’t be having this post now. But no, they had to go and create their next album.
The start of the downfall.
BE was ambitious, but it came off as a bit too pretentious. There was some interesting concepts, but it all seemed way over the top. It was a hard album to listen to, to say the least. Their next album, Scarsick, really didn’t help the cause. Instead of being pretentious like the college student that thinks he knows everything, the band decided to go juvenile, adding in unnecessary swearing, teenage anti-americanism, and just plain over-angst. There were some decent tracks (with “Idiocracy” being good and “Flame to the Moth” actually being pretty good), but the final result, as a concept album, was just not bearable.
The EP gave me hope though. The emotion that bled in The Perfect Element and Remedy Lane are there. Daniel, the vocalist, has a much more matured voice as well, it seems. Everything looks up, and maybe this could be a must buy for me.
BE is my favourite album by them. I could live with some of the spoken sketches but, oh well. Since it’s borderline classical, almost every classical composer ever is way more pretentious.i agree about Scarsick in some ways you describe, but I like the humoristic lyrics.
[...] as well as the pretentious and immature lyrics (respectively) of the two albums. I mentioned in a past post that their Linoleum EP was a good sign, and a possible change from, at least, the lyrical change [...]
Road Salt One review « The Slurpee Man's Mind said this on June 4, 2010 at 11:10 pm |