BE

I do love progressive metal! I do love bands such as dreamtheater, Evergrey AND Pain of Salvation. I've spent countless hours listening to the albums Be, One hour by the concrete lake, The perfect element and Remedy Lane.

As I see it the PoS saga really took off with the OHBTCL album, but it was a bit to pretentious. After the very nice works on TPE-part 1 the band turned to a moore folk- music influenced genre with teh RL album. I must confess that it took me quite some time to really appreciate that album, but now I really do.

Of course, I bought the BE album as soon as it hit the stores... I'm sorry, i do not like it! I listen to it a number of times, put it away for a month or so, start over again and so forth. But part from some songs and passages on the album I simply don't like it.

Why? Well, just like with the OHBTCL album it's just overly pretentious. I can't help to feel that the theme has been predecided and much of the lyrics have been written sort of "outside" the music.

Daniel Gildenlöw is a great musician, songwriter and singer, no doubt. But I lack the feeling of a band playing music. It feels almost like a soloalbum with wery little influences from the other bandmembers. Daniel says in the convolute that he has written on this album on and off since 1996, and it shows ;-)

I'm guessing now, but something tells me that there has not been much "jamming" in the making of this album.

If one should categorize albums in to three categories: music with lyrics, music and lyrics and lyrics with music I must say that this album belongs to the latter.