### Pain Of Salvation: Road salt one

#### 27/07/10 || Altmer

What do you get if you cross a hippie with a pretentious elitist, some insane musical talent, and a metrosexual image? The answer is not your homo dad. The answer is that singer from Pain of Salvation. He is some environmentalist hippie like the rest of the band, likes organic things and Star Wars, and has an insane fucken voice to boot. He also wrote some prog metal classics like “Remedy lane” and “The perfect element part 1”. So, why is their new album such a disgraceful piece of pretentious cowshit?

It’s like they stripped their music of everything that was good about it, decided to throw it out the window, do a lot of weed, and just record what came out. “Records need to sweat and bleed”, my ass. “Clicky prog metal drum production”, my ass. You guys already never sounded like that so why the “let’s be Jimi Hendrix” move all of a sudden? It doesn’t make you cool to go against the grain. It doesn’t make your songs work. This is some fantastically snoozing hard rock with some (still) insanely good vocals. I am firmly of the opinion this band is being contrary just because they can. And that is a retarded reason for change.

The thing is, this band is supposed to be “progressive”. Like, do new things. Unexplored territory. But this is a realm of music that is long dead and gone and they need to let it lie with the rest of the ghosts of the past (glam metal is another). There is no solace here. Yes, they can play all this stuff lazing on a Sunday morning with a full English breakfast in their stomachs, but whatever the fuck it is, it’s not new, or original. This style has been done before. The only thing that saves the record from being hideous is Daniel, who transforms all the mediocre psychedelic blues/whatever rock from bad into decent, just by virtue of the emotion and range in his voice.

The worst part about this album is that the ballads are the only good songs on the album. That means this band is doing something gigantically wrong. The band never wanted to stand still or make the same album twice, and I can respect that, but with every change they made they always kept to the framework of a sound that made them uniquely and distinctly Pain of Salvation. And with this album it’s like they decided that that identity wasn’t important anymore. The only thing that makes this sound like the band I know is the fact the vocals sound familiar. They could have progressed while sounding like the band I know. This “let’s go against the grain because we can” attitude is starting to really piss me off since they really have not got the material to back it all up. They don’t have the songs, they’re not Led Zeppelin, so this is not a genre meant for them. This is a boring and limited style and it makes for boring and limited albums. Where is the guy that wrote the awesome “A Trace of Blood?” “Used?” “! (Foreword)”? That guy is sure long gone by the sound of this album and it does not make the world a better place.

This album is a bunch of prog metal dudes gone all fucken hippie on our asses. They stopped making good music along the way. That is what this is and it can go fuck itself completely. Next time they’re gonna fucken make a hip-hop album. This is not what true prog metal is supposed to sound like. And don’t give me that shit about production, you can easily make proper prog metal with raw production and still have it sound good. You just have to know how to produce it. But this snoozefest is a complete fucken abomination and it doesn’t belong under the Pain of Salvation moniker.

Recommendation: Trash all copies of this album, re-do it, and write a fucken proper Pain of Salvation album next time. The way we all want and know it to sound.

- Information
- Released: 2010
- Label: Inside Out
- Website: www.painofsalvation.com
- Band
- Daniel Gildenlow: vocals, guitars, bass
- Johan Hallgren: guitars, backing vocals
- Fredrik Hermansson: keyboards, backing vocals
- Leo Margarit: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. No Way
- 02. She Likes to Hide
- 03. Sisters
- 04. Of Dust
- 05. Tell Me You Don’t Know
- 06. Sleeping Under the Stars
- 07. Darkness of Mine
- 08. Linoleum
- 09. Curiosity
- 10. Where It Hurts
- 11. Road Salt
- 12. Innocence