ONE HOUR BY THE CONCRETE LAKE

Pain of Salvation's second album presents a lot of general grousing about the state of the world today - backed up, at points, by statistics the band literally read out loud during the songs - whilst offering little coherent to suggest what may be done. With its running time artificially constrained to exactly 1 hour in keeping with the title, the band's darker and more hard-edged take on the Dream Theater sound is appealing, but here is compromised by the rather clumsy delivery of the points they wish to make. Ultimately, if they wanted to disseminate a bunch of facts, they could have just written a pamphlet or produced catchy and memorable protest songs instead of an oblique concept album.