Dancing with the Dead

Peter Tägtgren is talented, and very much so. He writes, he plays, he sings, he plays some more. And "Dancing With The Dead" just might be one of the best things he's done so far.

Every song seems to follow an identical structure - Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, chorus... But even so, each track on this album has a different feel from the next. Some of them have deliberately epic meloldies (Same Old Song), some are really fucking fast (Bye/Die), and some are so damn addictive to listen to that even a year after acquiring the album I can't stop listening to them on a near-constant basis (Dancing With The Dead, The Third Wave).

Pain's sound is a very well-executed blend of industrial/techno sounds and speed metal. The entire affair is incredibly melodic, and to refer to the project as pop songs with a metal makeover is no unfair criticism - You just have to be really pretentious to let that distract you from having fun listening to this.

There are a few things on this CD which bring it down very slightly in my opinion.

Firstly, Peter does some fantastic growls when he is singing with Hypocrisy - Why cut that out of Pain? I've seen a video of this album's title track performed live, and and his improvised addition of raw vocals to parts of the verses works brilliantly. Here's hoping to hear that in future Pain releases.

The other thing that bugs me are the appearance of several songs which are seemingly nothing but filler. Stay Away, My Misery and A Good Day To Die don't really contribute anything to "Dancing With The Dead", and I usually overlook them. Hell; I don't think I'd be able to hum the last one on that list with a gun to my head.

Other than those two little irks, the rest of the album is really, really good. Recommended for fans of newer material from The Kovenant and Samael.

Best tracks: Dancing With The Dead, Bye/Die, The Third Wave

... but Pain has always been pretty close to my heart, maybe because it's a side project of Peter Tagtren, a rarely good artist, and the greatest death metal vocalist ever, IMHO.
Pain can be described as a band that consistes of two different kinds of music: The early space/industrial METAL(Pain, Rebirth) and the later industrial hardcore era(Nothing Else Matters and this one).
Now since both of those styles make me wanna shoot myself, I simply find this little band pretty amusing and not at all as shitty as the rest.

Peter does not actually make a lot of notice on tehnique here, so forget about any solo's or classic metal riffing(as I did say, it's more of a modern hardcore style with industrial effects), this is pretty simple and would be VERY sucky if Peter was not so good in songwriting. And there he manages to nail it pretty hard. The songs simply sound good, there is no higher theory or explanation but that one, and there are some incredibly catchy songs to be found on here.

Ok... Tear It Up, Don't Count Me Out, Stay Away and It's a Good Day To Die are simply as crappy as mallcore. The others, especially The Third Way and Same Old Song are very groovy and pretty good.

Oh, yes... and Peter Tagtren can sing real well, without the growls and stuff. His vocals are the best on this album, definetly.

It's a nice release, and I find it pretty nice, but I'd certainly rather listen to Bloodbath, Hypocrisy or Possessed. ;)