THE PERFECT ELEMENT - PART 1

I suppose I'm just one of those people that I've seen on this site who find this album dreadfully dull and uninteresting, rather than a five star masterpiece. In general, I tend to agree with the opinions here when it comes to highly rated bands and albums. In fact, there are only three bands of the hundreds I've tried here I that I say I really dislike three; and Pain of Salvation, particularly with this release, is one of them.

I have tried to listen to this album about ten to twenty times, and almost every time I wanted to turn it off out of shear boredom and annoyance, and often did. The main problem is that every track that came on, I'd think, "oh cool, this is kind of an interesting intro... I wonder how they'll develop the song from that." And they never really did. Granted, the music itself sounds like it was put together in a pretty balanced way usually, but I never got out of the feeling of waiting for the song to go somewhere, only to be disappointed as it ended.

This is indeed progressive metal, and of the slightly more eclectic and less cliche type, using sounds and instrumentation that breaks even the mold of the progressive metal sound. This is the soul reason for me giving this more than a one star, is the uniqueness of sound. Guitar tones are pretty nice, and vocals are competently in tune with decent (albeit alternative sounding) tone.

Unfortunately, it's the composition, the rise and fall of a piece, the melody, harmonies, riffs and solos that make up the interest of a song. This album sounded more like a mushy mass of eclectic sounding prog metal in the end. The vocal melodies (and even the harmonies) were dull. The riffs were dull. The transitions between sections were dull. If I were to imagine something moving to this music, it would be a humanoid mass of sludge trying in vein to walk forward despite its own weight dragging itself back. This is the image, the feeling I had in my mind for every song beginning to end.

These are good musicians, and the album has good production, but the composition is just so under-developed that I have no interest in really pursuing other albums, except to find redemption for this band in for my ears. If you're a fan of this band, go for it. As highly rated as this album is, I reckon if you like their other work, you'll probably like this one.

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