THE PERFECT ELEMENT - PART 1

This album is, in my humble opinion, the biggest overrated album of this site. While I can understand all the fuss created by it, such an honour classification is quite unacceptable. Comparing this album to Dark Side of the Moon is undoubtfully outragious: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon marked a cut with all the reality of the music at that time - it showed a completely different way to make music! The Perfect Element part 1 not only do not show anything of particularly new, but also just limits to work on a space Queensrÿche started almost 20 years ago and Dream Theater started 9 years ago.

Although these initial critics, I cannot say this is a bad album by Pain of Salvation. In fact, the band shows here their songwriting and technical skills at their best, as the album is full of memorable refrains and instrumental passages. It has also many emotional sections, but, at times, the band seems not to fully make profit of them, running them in excessive dramatism which poison their intent.

Though captivating in few listenings, stucking you to like glue, the album sails in the sea of trivialness. It may be difficult to separate the emotional from the cognitive core of our ego, but if you do so, you realize, like I did, that this album, despite having great songs and good performances, did not bring anything of new to rock music. Good, but not essential.