The Perfect Element Part 1

Pain Of Salvation | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 14, 2000)
• Original Release Date: November 14, 2000
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Inside Out U.S.
• ASIN: B00005085N
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #189,628 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Used

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ~Perfect in every sense of the word~, May 20, 2004

By 

TensionExperiment (East Coast) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Perfect Element Part 1 (Audio CD)

The astounding thing about Swedish prog/metal whiz-kids Pain of Salvation is simple: You NEVER know what you are going to hear next. The Perfect Element is a crystal-clear example of their diversity. This was my third PoS purchase, behind Entropia and One Hour by the Concrete Lake. Let me say at the outset of this review, TPE is a radical departure from those aforementioned masterpieces.

After hearing this release, I quickly purchased Remedy Lane and the astounding 12:5, but looking at the entire PoS catalogue, TPE stands above all others as their crowning moment. Some have complained about the chunky/rap vocals on the opening track Used, some have bemoaned the fact that this release is not "proggy" enough.

I say, hrm. I have listened to this CD solid for a couple of months and can honestly say that I have yet to tire, and I continue to find wonder buried deep inside each and every song on the album. As far as I am concerned, and I know that I may be in the minority here, Daniel Gildenlow is one of the greatest vocalists to ever grace the music scene. There are moments when he lapses in operatic, saccharine-sweet mode, but this listener can only say that it adds to the quality of his vocal performances.

Musically I can honestly say that I believe PoS stand heads above the rest. Daniel Gildenlow is an amazing lyricist, as well as being a stylish guitarist. From the stunning "In the Flesh," which I feel is their finest recording, to the haunting "Ashes," and the phenomenal "Idioglossia," this album is a must have title.

HIGHLY recommended.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific, unique., February 28, 2001

By 

Lord Chimp (Monkey World) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Perfect Element Part 1 (Audio CD)

Pain of Salvation is one of progressive metal's most promising bands. While I consider myself a pretty big fan, I think The Perfect Element (Part I) is their only album that deserves five stars. Entropia was extremely original and mostly solid, but much the album's experimentation was too esoteric for its own good. One Hour By The Concrete Lake was an improvement, with better songs overall, but it was more straightforward progressive metal and it lacked the striking originality of Entropia. Clearly, a balance had to be achieved.

With The Perfect Element, PoS has refined their sound, synthesizing the remarkable uniqueness of Entropia and the stronger songcraft of One Hour. Gone are the awkward herky-jerky musical passages, the needlessly embellished vocals, and turgid lyrics. Here, everything works. No, it's not perfect. But it's damn good.

The band's nature is very eclectic, for they change musical bearing unpredictably. The first tract, "Used," best exemplifies this. It begins with the harrowing coupling of heavy guitars and synths, with vocalist Daniel Gildenlow's dark, fierce intonations. With the chorus, the song undergoes a complete change as it suddenly shifts into a harmonious melody with sharply contrasting "lighter" vocals. (Sound familiar, PoS fans? It's like "!" from Entropia, but better.) "Used" is a pretty extreme example, for the rest of the album is more cohesive from song to song, but the fundaments of this versatile approach remain intact. For those who are new to PoS, this might sound almost annoying. Let me aver that the polarizing course of the music is one of its greatest merits. Why? Because the they does it incredibly well. When a band can blend so many musical ideas so seamlessly and naturally, it's definitely stunning.

More so than any other Pain of Salvation record, this one has the most equal balance of strident heaviness and balladry. Soft piano leads, clean electric and acoustic guitars are used as often as heavy guitar riffery. This dichotomy may irk those who favor the aggression to ballads, but this album is best thought of as a whole (it is a concept album, after all). In that respect, the balanced qualities work well.

Daniel Gildenlow's vocals have improved much since One Hour By The Concrete Lake. He still reveals some weaknesses in the higher octaves, but he seems to have a better understanding of his strengths and weaknesses. He has also improved his lyricism. On previous albums they were almost silly in their gaudiness, but now they are just plain good. The poetic aptitude he shows in conveying this deeply emotional story about childhood is markedly impressive. As for the concept itself, it is extremely obscure, but this ensures that a lot of time will be spent unraveling this intricate story. For those listeners who don't care much about the lyrics, the album can be enjoyed simply by riding on the dynamic musical waves...

The album's only fault is its production. PoS' sound contains myriad textures, many of which are difficult to dissect because the production splatters everything into a blob of keyboards and guitars. The guitar tone often makes it difficult to distinguish individual notes. When Gildenlow sings softy with a dense background of instrumentation, his words can be unintelligible. Similarly, when multiple vocal lines are concurrently sung, making out individual words his needlessly hard. The production is imperfect, for certain, but in other ways the band has never sounded better. The keyboards in particular sound stronger, and the crunching guitars are more raucous, and the vocals are strikingly visceral.

In the end, the production doesn't detract from the listening experience too much, because it is so strong on the whole. Hopefully, The Perfect Element Part II will retain all of this one's merits and tweak the production.

(Final note: If you see this in a store, don't get apprehensive about the band's photo on the back. Sure, they look like Korn or some other "nu metal" band, but the looks are where the similarities end. Enjoy!)

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Broken, barren, desolate, disordered.. compelling..., December 23, 2005

By 

Boris Kaplun "asmox" (Reston, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Perfect Element Part 1 (Audio CD)

Last Christmas, my family decided to circulate a sort of wish list around to everybody via email on the premise that it's far easier to figure out what you want as opposed to what ten other people want. However, I was in a peculiar location at the time where I'd have been unable to store just about anything that anybody might have sent me, so I was ready to spare my family the trouble altogether. Then, I got to thinking about how excellent an opportunity this could be to trick my closest and most beloved people on the planet into listening to some music of my choosing.

You see, I would love to share much of the music that I listen to with as many other people as I can. Unfortunately, the type of person who will tolerate what I listen to in any sincere fashion is a very rare find. This makes me sad - not because I think everybody should listen to what I listen to, but because it pains me to see one of the wonders of the world fall away into relative obscurity, leaving only a diluted shell of itself for people to listen to and say, "This would make good background noise for (insert activity here)".

I should say that nobody in my family outside of myself considers music to be a very significant part of their lives... so why did I ask a bunch of people to listen to a bunch of music that they probably wouldn't even enjoy? Well, my purpose wasn't to make any of them like it, but something very different.

So, of all the bands I could have employed in my evil scheme - why Pain of Salvation? This band, and more specifically this album, means a lot to me. It also means a lot to me to have people so close to me experience something that I personally hold so dear. And so, here we are.

This Swedish group is home to Daniel Gildenlow - lyricist, vocalist, and primary songwriter. This man is possibly my most revered in all of music. Every album this band has released is a concept album - a concept album is an album which is unified from start to finish by a single theme or pre-conceived story, with this theme or story being the "concept". While Pain of Salvation is certainly not the only band out there to write concept albums, they certainly do write some of the more staggering ones, thanks to Daniel. From what I understand, he has always been very interested in the dirty underbelly of politics, social injustice, environmental devastation, and many other wrong doings that are going on around the world... and he has an uncanny ability to take these concepts, craft an interesting conceptual framework around them, build the world around that framework, arrange the musical journey through that world, and deliver it all with unmatched integrity, complexity, intelligence, and passion. To this day, they have written five such albums, with themes ranging between the individual, society, war, environment, existence, humanity, et al.

On their third, The Perfect Element I, Daniel follows the lives of a boy and a girl in the streets of a fictional place known as Idioglossia. Both the boy and girl are growing up with something missing in their lives, and the way they choose to fill these empty spaces is quite a self-destructive and jarring journey through the most depraved recesses of society. However, the album isn't just a depressing story about two lost children... it covers many themes, including: childhood, adolescence, violence, sexuality, tragedy and loss, relationships between the individual and his society, states of the human mind and soul, and the exploration of emotional extremes (including love, pain, anger, shame, regret...), among other things. In Daniel's own words, this is a story about two people fighting against the wounds inflicted upon them by their past, about love as a path to reconciliation, and about a society that introduces various "malfunctions" into a few people and then fights to exclude them as they become dangers to this same society. Daniel has been exploring people in the backside of society ever since their first album, Entropia, but all of that and more is approached far more boldly here. The story is split up into three chapters - "As These Two Desolate Worlds Collide", "It All Catches Up On You When You Slow Down", and "Far Beyond the Point of No Return" - with each chapter consisting of four tracks.

Of course, fancy shmancy concepts are nothing without an appropriate presentation. Fortunately, Daniel's vocal delivery is filled with a sense of raw emotion, power, and honesty that I have not heard from any other. Not only is he very intelligent and a wonderful lyricist, but he is also a brilliant vocalist. His voice is extremely dynamic (and sometimes admittedly over-dramatic), ranging from the deepest and darkest intonations to Broadway-worthy soaring. He has stated in many interviews that he believes progressive metal to be a fairly stale thing when it comes to vocals, what with guys constantly hanging around the upper registers and worrying more about over-extended histrionics than relaying any kind of emotion... and so he tries to avoid this very real trend. The results are often fascinating. He is also very passionate and thus it is easy to empathize with what he is saying. In fact, I get the sense that the entire band greatly desires the listener to empathize with the events that are being portrayed by the lyrics and to really feel what Daniel is feeling as he sings. They truly want you to understand the messages that they are trying to get across with their music.

That brings me to something very important - the impact that this album, or really any Pain of Salvation album, has on the listener is multiplied ten-fold if the listener knows what is being said. Listening to Daniel sing with soothing elegance over a tranquil piano line is one thing, listening to his brooding voice in pain and agony on top of a turbulent musical collage is another... but when you add the last piece of the puzzle (that being the lyrics), everything becomes so much more powerful. It's like suddenly all the disjointed musical discordance and theatrical vocal performances fall into perfect context. For this reason, it's imperative that you find a way to follow the words... either read them beforehand, read them while listening (which might detract from the listening part), or listen once, read, and then listen again... or something. It also should be noted that, since these guys are Swedish, there's the occasional grammatical inconsistency. However, all in all, it's hard to tell that Daniel even has an accent, and whatever errors there may be in the writing do not detract from the cohesion in the slightest - and it also makes you think, or at least it makes me think, what Daniel could have done with all this stuff if English was his native language.

The question you're probably asking now is what's going on here musically? Well, I could throw out some idioms typical of progressive metal - equal parts driving metal, acoustic passages, epic arrangements, cinema-scopic buildups, rhythmic complexity, so on and so forth. While those statements may describe what's going on here on a superficial level, they don't really capture the essence of the thing. Also, there's little to no instrumental over-indulgence to be found here. The guys can play with the best of them, but all displays of technical proficiency which are found on this album are infused into the arrangements, which are built entirely to serve the concept. In that aspect alone, they are unique among their peers.

"Used" kicks off with splashes of metallic chords on top of a driving drum pattern, before dropping off into a pulsing rhythm with Daniel ranting in a dark and hoarse whisper - "I am the unclean - the black drop at the bottom of your cup - you'd better drink or throw me up 'cause I'm on your lip and tongue - God! - I'm not yours as much as you are mine - so let me in to be your lung - just breathe me deep and take another sip - so still - a taste so sweet but so bitter the kill! - still on your lip, you are so close - I'll let you come between my legs, you are closer death than sun - and I'm not your daughter as much as you're my son - I'll let you come - in my mouth, on your lip - so ready and thirsty for the next sip - you let me in, I let you come - I'd never let you down - you let me win, I'll let you drown!" The last is delivered with a powerful roar as various vocal lines coalesce on top of each other, and then the darkness gives way to make room for an uplifting passage that's in striking opposition to what came only moments before - and to what will come only moments after. Later down the line, the song is broken by an almost bluesy guitar solo, and proceeds to build momentum and tension before exploding into a powerful storm of unbridled emotion.

In fear of falling into a track-by-track description that I was originally intending to avoid, I'll just say that there aren't really any formulas in use here, but if I had to depict a kind of connecting musical theme from song to song, it would be that epic buildup of tension and consequent cathartic release in the form of an emotional storm that, if nothing else, is often tear jerking. The Perfect Element I is an album driven by emotion and dynamics on a level beyond any other album I have ever heard in this genre.

I do have to say a few things about several of the tracks here, though -

"In the Flesh" is a huge teaser. A repetitive and pleasant arrangement of clean guitars and soft drums throughout the first few minutes of this song do a good job of putting you in the "mood", so to speak. When the band finally does come through in force, though, the wait will have been more than worth it. Very powerful music over the last several minutes, with Daniel's massively moving two-sided narration of an encounter between two characters that's guaranteed to... Read more ›