Artist: Pain Of Salvation
Label: Inside Out Records
Release: 2009
Runtime: approx. 200 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Pain Of Salvation are one of the finest progressive bands to emerge when interest in that genre prefix came roaring back (this time in metal). That interest was sparked mostly by Dream Theater’s stage presence in the early nineties. Pain Of Salvation are a band with an extraordinary musical vision and range. Step into their world of uniquely singular musical artistry and it’s like tapping into the knowledge of a bottomless wellspring that just keeps fulfilling and thrilling you, never letting up. With their highly charged messages, their incredible polish - both sonically and compositionally, and the superb synergy of a quintet that grasps and follows the creative spark of five minds while flawlessly building on each other’s ideas and turning them into something one-of-a-kind, Pain Of Salvation stand at the very top of the world’s artistry. Artistry, as rock understands it. In that sense, they’re true musical wizards!
It wasn’t until 2005 that the band headed out on their first real headlining tour of Europe, promoting their fifth studio album “Be” (2004). The tour was a huge success, which is hardly surprising, since with the excellent albums released between 1997 and 2004 they had built a solid, wide base of loyal fans.
The first disc of this double DVD is an 80-minute documentary that takes us straight into the heart of the backstage action, everything a music fan, who normally only gets up close with a band when they head to a gig with a ticket in their pocket, usually misses out on. The story begins in the idyllic Swedish countryside, where we meet the band gathering for a tuning rehearsal and laying out their arsenal of instruments, all for the sake of calibrating the physical Pain Of Salvation being within. The viewer/listener then hops on the tour bus with the band. The film brings us close to the life of the band and its crew on the road, packed with fun details: from snacking on Kinder eggs and counting the money from merch sales, to Daniel Gildenlow fighting off a cold and his brother Kristoffer’s swollen left eye, plus the different ways the band members relax before heading out on stage. The whole documentary is backed by very personal statements from the band members about individual moments of everyday tour life. Before you move on to the concert disc (the second one), be sure to watch the first one first, because the energy of the band’s incarnations differs between the two discs. As the title of the DVD itself says, the split between the discs refers to the band’s double death, or double transformation. At the end of that tour the band let go of one of its pillars, Kristoffer Gildenlow, because of the incompatibility of the bassist’s “daily biorhythm”: the man lives in Utrecht (the Netherlands), while the rest of the crew is of course in Sweden. Definitely anything but an easy situation, and the guys, with Daniel at the helm, had to find a way to face it. The weight of the decision and its consequences is captured in the metaphor that this was the moment the band died for the first time.
The real value of this DVD, of course, lies in the second disc, which captures the band’s entire concert at the Paradiso club in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on March 2, 2007. On this tour the band was presenting the album “Scarsick” (2007). By then they had already brought in new bassist Simon Andersson, who replaced Kristoffer Gildenlow. Soon after the tour, another member the band is hard to imagine without left. That’s drummer Johan Langell, who joined Pain Of Slavation in 1990, when he was only 14 (Daniel was 16 at the time). So this is a member who had a decisive influence on the band’s sound and image, which is why Daniel’s hint that his departure was the band’s second death is completely justified.
We’ve finally made it to the lines dedicated to the live performance, the sound and the picture, which is the heart of this DVD review. The Paradiso hall holds, by eyeball, around 1,000 people, balconies on the first and second floors included. Has anyone ever been in the SKC hall in Belgrade? If so, you’ll get a rough feel for it: a hall where other kinds of performing arts (ballet, theater, etc.) can be staged too. The crowd is crammed right up against the stage. There was no room for accredited photographers or camera operators. So two cameras were set up on stage – left and right – and three on the balconies. Two of those were again on the left and right sides of the hall, and the third straight across from the stage, at the back of the hall. Pain Of Salvation can’t boast a hefty budget that would bring a lavish and interesting stage lighting rig, special light effects and visual surprises to the stage show itself. During the show we mostly get single-color “bursts” of light beams, whether white, red or blue, while a good part of the concert unfolds atmospherically in soft lighting or in moments of total blackout, which adds up to a “bootleg”, “alternative” feel for the whole recording.
The camera operators were of course shortchanged when it comes to shots, since they don’t offer the viewer real “close-ups”; the cameras are limited to distant focus, so the footage isn’t as good, neither in sharpness nor in framing, because with the far-off placement the chosen shots lose sensitivity. The day is saved by the two stage cameras, which put the viewer/listener right on stage, where they can clearly observe the stage antics of individual members, whether they’re in the spotlight doing their thing or stepping back to take a sip of water and so on.
What makes this recording a winner and gives it its special stature is the performance of the material. It deserves a straight ten, a flawless “excellent”. Of course, you have to subtract the presence of later studio touch-ups to the raw recordings. The sound is incredibly clear, every building block perfectly audible. The band’s boss, mastermind and musical visionary Daniel Gildenlow literally stuns the viewer/listener with the double perfection of a top-class singer and guitarist rolled into one person. The man skillfully uses the natural talent of his vocal chameleonism, which spontaneously morphs through many guises over the course of the show, with a genuinely spontaneous, fully immersed feel. Daniel moves like a fish in water, from erotically manly guttural roughness, in which he authoritatively dictates the character of a song, to switches into an androgynous mode, even girlish sighs, or the warmth of breathy singing and narration, but always with the melody clearly front and center and, most importantly, with the emphasis on emotion.
But without a superbly tight crew there’d be nothing! On this recording Pain Of Salvation show fantastic cohesion and offer musical perfection in terms of expression, the fruit of a bravura multilayered integration of diverse genre approaches, stunning in their basic complexity and in the simultaneous perfection of execution the quintet delivers at every point of this recording, especially on the technical side.
The concert recording keeps the viewer/listener highly alert throughout, mostly thanks to the stormy swells of mood it captures. The show opens with a jolt, building an avalanche-massive wall of sound in Starsick (both guitarists use lower tunings and seven-string guitars), then surprises with a complete about-face in America, with the kind of chorus that doesn’t hide D. Gildenlow’s former membership in The Flower Kings. The middle of the recording hits the highest intensity of the album’s captured atmospheres, especially in the calm of New Years’s Eve, Ashes, Undertow and Brickworks 1. In these moments it’s not hard to drift away and give yourself completely over to the singular energy of Pain Of Salvation’s musical expanses. The “return to consciousness” is marked by the orientally spiced Chain Sling, and it builds from there as the show steers into a closing “crescendo” through the sharper Diffidentia and Flame To The Moth. That real fans had gathered in the Paradiso that day is confirmed by Disco Queen, the track from “Scarsick”, which got the whole hall on its feet and indirectly proved that by the time of this recording “Scarsick” had already caught on nicely with the audience.
A band without exactly a feel for the blues couldn’t entirely avoid it in their cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, where the guys even gave the backing vocal lines a gospel treatment. Of course, they pulled off the challenge once again, approaching it in an authentic “painofsalvation” way and delivering one more witty musical experience. An atmospheric veil hangs over the whole recording, conjuring the dark, melancholy mood of the “pain of salvation”. Just as it should be!
Gildenlow is an excellent host for the evening and spiced up the show with humorous remarks, which earns the recording bonus points. However much Pain Of Salvation dragged their feet on releasing this DVD, pushing the date back several times, it turned out to be very welcome, because the release caught the historic, evolutionary moment of the band’s incarnation cycle closing, the cycle that put this lineup on the planet’s musical map and earned it high esteem in wider musical circles. After the rebirth, things will never be the same again for Pain Of Salvation. That’s an undeniable fact. That’s why this document is all the more important in the band’s released catalog, and at the same time a must-have in the collection of every music purist and gourmand who demands only the best for their listening pleasure! For the listening pleasure, strictly speaking, because the level of the film footage of this concert could definitely be improved. Hence the point deducted from the overall rating!
Lineup
Daniel Gildenlöw – vocals, guitar
Johan Hallgren – guitar, backing vocals
Fredrik Hermansson, keyboards, backing vocals
Simon Andersson – bass guitar, backing vocals
Johan Langell – drums, backing vocals
Track list
DVD1 – The First Death Of
“SixWorlds/EightDays” (80-minute documentary from the world ’05 tour, directed by Per Hillblom
DVD2 – The Second Death Of
“Touching You Harder: Live From Amsterdam”
01. Scarsick
02. America
03. Nightmist
04. ! (Foreword)
05. Handful Of Nothing
06. New Year’s Eve
07. Ashes
08. Undertow
09. This Heart Of Mine (I Pledge)
10. Chain Sling
11. Diffidentia (Breaching The Core)
12. Flame To The Moth
13. Disco Queen
14. Hallelujah
15. Cribcaged
16. Used
