Post for making the guys at Empireavenue accept my blog !

Hallgren

I have come to realize that Pain Of Salvation is a strange band, really bizarre in a multitude of aspects. Dan Gildenlow has sculpted the sound in a rather adventurous way, anyone can instantly recognize that they are introspective and dead serious but they are far from being funereal. The music is bloody melodic but never cloying. there is an immense feel to the vocals, deep and unnerving concepts depicted with bland unpretentious lyrics tangled with unsurpassed vocals. The sound is far from being extreme nor are they accessible enough for mainstream absorption, the choruses are hardly tailored for live shows, in short Pain Of Salvation seems to have discoverrd a seemingly catastrophic modus operandi.

Last week I had been to their gig at IIT Chennai, the turn out was sparse, far below what Opeth had pulled at the same venue 2 years ago. This was like a testament to their reputation of being rather inaccessible, imagine a band which exudes raw brash headlong head banging on rampart like sound could pull more people than a seemingly harmless Pain Of Salvation. It was cordial of Dan Gildenlow to share stage with the opening band Nerverek, he even called their vocalist back on stage during their show, I am pretty much sure that he made his life. Gildenlow did pull off some on stage histrionics like playing leads on top of a 10 feet speaker before riding onto the stage in an auto-rickshaw and he did play the drums for The Beatles cover, they pretty much continued playing till the cops came around and snapped the power, it was a very honest gig.

I had imagined Pain Of Salvation as a very sober performers who connected only with their unwavering  fans but as always Dan Gildenlow managed to raise the bar and did show a very vibrant facet to their character. The depth in their music was by far matched by their on stage vibrancy and more uniquely their uninhibited spontaneity which clearly stood out in a proliferated world of live gigs.

Morningrise does not have something for everyone but it definitely offers everything possible for a progressive death fan who wants to walk into a rising sun on a winter morning with Black Rose Immortal.

Morningrise

Avatar can be called ground breaking for the sole reason that it proved direction, imaginative scripts and original concepts as the aspects of the past, in future all the movies may have same story executed in different contexts with different colors of animated people along with the actors having a role only behind the screens.

To cut short this pain, I can say that this movie epitomizes and celebrates loudness in all its varieties, its loud and abusive in terms of exploiting computer aided graphics, its loud in explaining its predictive plot, its loud with shockingly banal characters showering stereotyped dialogues, its a perfect text book for soap opera mongers and computer graphic technicians.

In my head movie should not become a portal for exhibiting technology, it should be a critique in a deceptive way, it should be sober and pragmatic in developing a concept, technology should only be an aid not the reason for a movie. I am deeply disappointed with this Cameroon flick and would like to end with the following quote.

“It’s not in my top three Jim Cameron films. … at what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next?” ^— Duncan Jones,

Avatar

Getting used to the pain

“I wanted a name that meant something, a name that was more than a cool expression. For me, Pain of Salvation has the meaning of balance. Taking the good with the bad. It is also a good expression in everyday use, when something does not go the way you planned; “well, that’s just the pain of salvation,” to indicate that this is just a slight setback on an otherwise painless journey towards your goal.” - Daniel Gildenlöw

Just experienced the pain of salvation, on hindsight listening to this band made a bizarre sense during my trip to the “communist” nation. I was dodging bullets from Bangalore but when crisis invited me to Beijing another war started inside my head. Even a cult epic movie like Escape from Alcatraz failed to inspire confidence in me, everything paled in comparison to the colossus at Bejing.

I never plan any trip nor I learn from mistakes, this was the nadir of all of the unplanned trips ever. Landed in Beijing, thanks to the temperature outside, my brain was frozen and hence insulated from the shock i got when i saw the snow covered concrete landscape up above from the plane. I had come to an early winter in China with a flimsy jacket and a sweater which had lost its purpose even with the Bangalore winter.

Everything has started on the wrong foot, all the plans went kaput. Four days into the trip and I was breathing fire, all this heat woke up my frozen brains (and also special thanks to hot water machine) and then there was a divine intervention, I just got the right amount of ammo in the nick of time for cracking this edifice of problems which had reached its pinnacle by then. From this point on the events unraveled in more favorable way, in another three days a perfect work around for the problem was invented and a day before the last day the root cause was also clear. All are happy!

Most of the days I used to skip taking the cab from work and took a long walk back to the hotel, with music running even a country as alien as this felt so welcoming, I hardly seem to care about the glares or the frosty wind or the perennial problems plaguing my life at work. Music was there for me once again, Many many thanks to Åkerfeldt & Gildenlow and also a BIG thanks to my significant other who was supernaturally understanding and supportive, definitely feel fortunate to have found you.

This record transcends the normal decorum of mathematics, here high (read Progressive) and low (read Death) combined together is not a NULL, Akerfeldt must have been simultaneously strung up on Alcohol and grass when he composed Still Life.

Mind you “Still Life” does not have the *I got struck by lightning* kind of an effect ( Checkout “Arsis:A Celebration of guilt” to know more about that effect), this record methodically seeps into every iota of musical nerves inside your human body and gets ingrained there. I have been listening to this band for more than a year now, Still Life is the high point and Ghost Reveries is the trough of the Opeth wave.

This is a long pending post, i have never dared to write about “Still Life” , my vocabulary prowness can never do justice to such a complex form of musical expression. I am so infatuated with this record that if I continue writing about this then i will start shovering cliches which I have (hopefully) refrained from till now.

OPETH

Words would falter to atone
Failure had passed the stepping stone
She sworn her vows to another
This is when no-one will bother

When did we all let you down
So come Messiah show us how how
Our human spirit drowns
Don’t think you hear me now
No sign of you around
What is it you hope to see

- Dream Theater

I can go on on ranting about Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence, it creates such a unique ambiance , from one song to another from one melody to another one, I always make it a point to buy the records of the band which I like and sometimes I even buy records of the bands which the bands which I like like, I discovered Blue Oyster Cult just because one of their compilations were produced by Bruce Dickinson.

Music keeps me steady, given in right harmonic proportion it counterbalances all the chemical imbalances. It gives me a  high and a low at the same time, its just the god of all the medicines ever made by mankind!

Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence