Review Summary: Progressive metal was never the issue
In the Passing Light of Day was teased as the return of something recognisably Pain of Salvation. That is, something quintessentially, incontestably Pain of Salvation – a harkening back to the band’s existence before
Be and later,
Scarsick, divided fan opinion. The tease was delivered by promising the return of progressive metal.
Genre is something concrete to cling to when a band’s identity is in disarray. There is a powerlessness we face when something we cannot articulate slips away. When a band doesn’t feel the same anymore, it’s easier to pin it on changes in surface style rather than inner soul. The former admits of explicit diagnosis and the promise of a controlled solution. Go back to playing the guitars louder, heavier – do complex rhythms. The latter defies manipulation, allows us sometimes only the inchoate sense of noticing it and the option of accepting it.
The experimentation with orchestra, the turn to straight hard rock and blues – these aren’t the grounds of Pain of Salvation’s late career crisis. The anxiety over the band centres on its
heart and the personal development of its principle songwriter, lyricist, vocalist and visionary, Daniel Gildenlow. The man has often been accused of arrogance, egotism, and self-importance. “! (Foreword)”, the opening song of their debut album asks the listener to follow the band on a journey, one that invites an opportunity to make a stand in changing the world. That’s unabashed – yes, possibly arrogant – confidence in the power of the music. But it’s youthful confidence, swept up in hope and dreams and the magical potency of art. And more importantly, it’s confidence directed outward, at a goal. There is a world out there that needs healing and together we can do it.
Pain of Salvation stills brims with confidence – it still takes itself to be brave but any sense of purpose in its power seems lost in late releases. The
Road Salt albums meander in aimless introspection. They churn over emotions for no sake but to bare them. Anything but the self drops out of view. Even the intensely personal
Remedy Lane at least anchored itself in concrete geography. You were in Budapest, by the Danube.
Road Salt surrenders even any overarching story. All that is left are isolated moments of feeling. The seeds of this solipsistic turn are there in
Scarsick. For all its political posturing, the album is never about solving anything. It’s just there to scream. And even the god projected through the story of
Be is only interested in understanding itself. By the end of these previous releases, Daniel seems content just to tell us how “wild” he is and to thrash about in feeling. It’s hard not to find it self-indulgent. And it’s hard not to feel disenchanted by the loss of Daniel the dreamer. What does he believe in now? What does he want to communicate beyond immediate emotion?
These are the questions I wanted
In the Passing Light of Day to resolve. A return to the band I loved would have to be a return to a band with youthful, even naïve ambition and belief. Progressive metal was never the issue. Of course, it’s exciting to hear the band dress itself in its garb from yester-years. When “On A Tuesday” opens and builds its jerking rhythms, it’s hard not to smile and feel the excitement, even if fuelled through nostalgia. And though the metal is less melodic than anything from, say,
The Perfect Element Pt I – it’s more driven by chaos and chugging heaviness, it still conjures atmospheres from the band’s glory-day.
Yet this isn’t the Pain of Salvation from back then. Oh, it takes you closer to the experience than
Road Salt did. Things are once again given context – we have a narrative, this one centred on Daniel’s recent brush with death. There is thus a frame to hang the emotive weight of the record on. The sheer force of explicit, visceral feeling need not do all the work. Yet despite the abundance of philosophical riches that facing death affords, Daniel still does little more than plumb his own interiority. He seems determined to “out-human” everyone in honesty and in giving full expression to the dark, creatureliness inside of him. But the self-scrutiny required of him in the task oddly pulls him out of his humanity and makes him less relatable. In “Full Throttle Tribe” he speaks of “not signing on to this mankind” and his inability to identify with any colour, race or creed. Such special connections to one’s immediate neighbour or land may be hard to justify from the objective, “view from nowhere”, but it is part of our humanity than we are here, on the ground, embedded in a culture. Daniel seems to find it hard to connect to that part of his humanity not found in his detached sense of self. Even as he sings in “On A Tuesday” about the things humans do to plead for more time, he distances himself. He doesn’t close his hands in prayer, but in fists, he tells us.
Thankfully, the rawness of Daniel’s self-exposure is genuinely intimate on the outstanding self-titled closing track. Here, the setting of the hospital bed, inches from death, delivers its emotional pay-off as Daniel sings sweetly to his wife, his “lover, best friend”. As she watches him slip into the passing light of day, Daniel is quickened to the salience of the present moment and the love that they share. Latent in its story-telling is (finally) a
message about what we should appreciate and the song manages to be the most touching the band has written since
Remedy Lane. This is the moment on the album that successfully resurrects the Pain of Salvation from over a decade ago and serves as a reminder that however much we change, it’s hard to totally break with who we were.
Yet sadly for me there just aren’t enough of those moments on
In the Passing Light of Day to assure that Pain of Salvation can consistently be the same band now in its core identity and essence that it used to be. It’s an album with much to enjoy in its creativity, intensity and grandeur, yet when I come close to it seeking intimacy and familiarity, I find I can’t
love it. I’ll admit that I perceive the change in the soul of the band as a decline. But this also speaks of my own journey growing up, the paths I have taken and the values I have adopted. I don’t feel as bereft of hope and external goals as Pain of Salvation seems to be. The rupture between this band and myself is not down to the snatching force of death this album focuses on. It’s a case of people growing apart, going separate ways. That even this “come-back” album could not reconcile our differences forces me to accept that this is where the road parts.
