SCARSICK

Previous to hearing this album, I have only heard Pain Of Slavation in bits and pieces, and those bits and pieces have never inspired me to look any deeper, until now. Scarsick is an fantastic piece of work. It's beautiful, moody, well-written...It's the work of a truly interesting and mature rock band, the band I never heard in previous releases (I am currently trying to get into The Perfect Element, and thus far I am a good deal less impressed than I was with Scarsick).

From the first note to the last fade-out, there is never an moment that isn't completely interesting and throughly enjoyable. Actually, the first track, while decent, may be the weakest on the album simply because for much of it's length it sounds similar to something many other bands could do. The rest of the album does not share that fault. POS do, on many occasions, employ one of my least favorite of current rock cliches - namely a really heavy verse section followed by a melodic chorus section (call it 'killswitch engage' syndrome, the first track on The Perfect Element suffers horribly from it), but where in previous efforts it sounded just as silly and forced as it does with Killswich, on Scarsick it works seamlessly.

I actually like the second half of the album better than the first. 'Cribcaged' is a nice piece of work, but on this album it's secondary to the stellar 'Kingdom of Loss'. Like most tracks, it seems to follow a basic ABAB type of pattern, but with just the right kind of variation each time to keep things interesting, and to maximize the emotional message. Indeed, thinking back, the album feels far larger and more complex than it really is, which is credit to the skilled songwriting and interesting arrangements. In fact I think one of the reasons the album works so well is the smart mix it was given - someone in the production booth understands that atmospheric recording and giving the instruments room to breathe can sound just as heavy, heavier maybe, than cranking up huge, overdubbed guitars into both ears.

Let's talk about 'Disco Queen' for a second. This song seems to stir the ire of long time POS fans, but I intuitively enjoyed it. Perhaps it's my love of bands like Mr. Bungle (or for that matter composers like Gustav Mahler, who used to interpose funeral marches and dance music), or my love of dark humor, but the mix of dark imagry and super-poppy disco beats makes perfect emotional sense to me. It's fun, creative, and it's own way 'heavier' than if they just did it as a standard rock song. The same is true of 'Spitfall', which mocks rap cliches while simultaneously exploiting them and one-upping them in songwriting department.

Perhaps with time previous POS albums will dawn on me, and I will prefer them to the ease with which this album captured my attention, but at this point it's hard to imagine myself forcing a copy of The Perfect Element in the hands of one of my friends, insiting "you HAVE to hear this", as I did with Scarsick. And even if I do, I find it next to impossible that I will ever actually dislike Scarsick at all. I hope all the Pain of Salvation fans who hate it will give it another try, because in my opinion it contains some of the most basic and integral elements of what makes music worth listening to.