T
here’s a contrast between Pain of Salvation’s Road Salt One and Road Salt Two. This not only reflects the time between the releases of the two albums, though obviously intended to be part of the same sequence, but also perhaps reflects the time between when, I as a listener, was exposed to them.
Pain of Salvation has always been at it’s core a Daniel Gildenlöw project. With these albums and the line-up’s final disintegration following them, that’s even more abundantly clear. What the albums have in common is a shift in sound — that “change” thing that fans love to hate.
At times Gildenlöw seems to be fashioning himself as a latterday Jeff Buckley, and he’s not entirely bad at it. Gildenlöw has always been good at pulling off the fragile but beautiful. Where he does that on these two albums, he does it well.
Gildenlöw is also very good at coming across as a holier-than-thou twit. And that’s where things fall apart.
In the past, there were enough other things going on in Pain of Salvation’s songs to dilute those two sides of Gildenlöw. The holier-than-thou act was present but not overbearing on One Hour By The Concrete Lake. It was also there and unfortunately overwhelming on Scarsick, where the music failed to hold up it’s end and Gildenlöw’s “insights” were awfully shallow.
The more raw emotion mixed into The Perfect Element I and Remedy Lane led to some of the band’s best work (to date, I suppose), where Gildenlöw’s vocal and lyrical talent blend well with interesting musical passages, all of which lock into the greater theme.
So, the Road Salt albums.There’s a lot more flailing around in Road Salt One. Gildenlöw seems to be exercising too much new found freedom and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it is condescending crap. Some of it is mediocre ideas that maybe point in a decent direction but never actually move that way.
What sticks are the songs where Gildenlöw plumbs the emotional depths that have served well in the past. “Sisters” is an agonizing look at human weakness. And the songs where the music takes the backseat (or gets left by the curb as the car speeds away) let Gildenlöw’s voice shine. “Road Salt” in particular shows everything that Gildenlöw can do right vocally, to the extent the music can just hover in the background in a diminished role.
And that’s where maybe time led to Road Salt Two being more refined. Gildenlöw sowed his oats on Road Salt One and so was able to refocus things a bit for Road Salt Two. “To The Shoreline”, “1979″, and “Through The Distance”, with the vocals so clearly at the forefront, are well done, and “Conditioned” is the only song among the two albums that I think really hits the retro vibe well.
Road Salt Two is by no means a masterpiece, but there’s more to like (or less to hate) than on Road Salt One. Or maybe time has tempered my expectations in a way that allowed me to enjoy it more. (The “why” doesn’t really matter that much.)
But Gildenlöw shows he can make some different but great music — if you’re willing to sift through his self-indulgent crap to find it. When he focuses on his vocals, there is a strength there that compensates for the music being more low key. And now that Pain of Salvation is so clearly the Daniel Gildenlöw solo project maybe that’s where he’ll concentrate musically.
Or maybe he’ll try something else next time just to shake things up again.
