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Pain Of Salvation - Remedy Lane CD (album) cover

REMEDY LANE

Pain Of Salvation

 

Progressive Metal

4.24 | 1290 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

sleeper
Prog Reviewer
4 stars With The Perfect Element, Pain of Salvation was able to blend all of their strongest aspects together and even boost some of them, so the question is how do you follow up a near perfect album? Well, in Daniel Gildenlow's case, he decides to create an album with the central concept based around a very tragic moment in his and his wife's lives, the miscarriage of what would have been their first child, but with a few fictional events thrown in as well.

Once again Pain of Salvation prove that it's the blend of deep emotional connection from the lyrics augmented by powerful, complex and feeling driven music that makes this such a great album in a similar way to its predecessor, The Perfect Element. As you can imagine, the overriding feeling of this album is very bleak and sad, punctuated by a couple of softer, calmer, more easily digestible songs, namely This Heart Of Mine ( I Pledge) and Second Love. The constant sense of loneliness and pain really does get to you with this album, bringing your mental state down a notch along the way with the previously named tracks being the only real let up to this and allowing the listener to recover a bit.

The music the band play is maintained at an extremely high level that was set on their debut album, Entropia. In-fact, if there's one thing that can be said for it is that it has been made a bit more streamlined to make it more catchy, more commercial almost, but without sacrificing the complex layers and arrangements, just making them a little easier to get into and follow. However, this isn't actually easier to get into than The Perfect Element because of the downcast atmosphere, which can put some people off, or make it hard to listen to regularly. Also, despite the impressive quality of musicianship from them, many of the songs don't quite grab you so intensely, like past greats of Pain Of Salvation. However, as always, there are definite exceptions to this and in particular is A Trace of Blood, Rope Ends and Beyond The Pale. On these three songs, as well as numerous points throughout the album but most pronounced here, they show their incredible command of breathtaking structure, rhythm change and an all out feel of how to grab you and just rock. Listening to Beyond The Pale, from the opening clipped chords to the closing chant of Gildenlow, is an affirmation of why I love this band.

This album is filled with moments and songs that I really love and enjoy listening to regularly, but the concept and its effect over, and with, the music makes it very difficult to get into for some people, and can easily be passed off as an angst filled rant, a stance that belittles the albums true nature. I do find, though, that it never quite grabs me in the same way that The Perfect Element did, a milestone that all of Pain of Salvation's albums will now be measured against, and in the end its this slight deficiency to its predecessor that holds it back from receiving 5 stars from me, though it gets incredibly close so I'll give it 4.5, rounded down to 4. A very worthy addition to any prog collection and a must have for most.

sleeper | 4/5 |

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