Pain of Salvation, Panther

I’ve always had a pretty obsessive behaviour when Pain of Salvation was involved, but after In the passing light of day, I had taken the passion to a whole new level, listening to it with commitment for months in a row. So one can imagine the excitement and the high bar I had set for a new POS record. Unfortunately, as it usually is when you expect the moon and the stars, Panther came out as a bit of a disappointment, as it’s nowhere near the brilliance of their previous release. Fortunately, it’s quite a grower and after multiple listens I have started to catch its charm.

As a display of pretty much everything I love about Pain of Salvation, Accelerator is one of my favourite tracks. Melodic, intense, with soaring emotional vocals from Daniel, with the all too known maddening bass in the background and with powerful lyrics, it’s a strong start for the album and sets up high expectations.

Dissonant and with a minor tonality, Unfuture grows both in terms of song development and in terms of one’s opinion on it. The minimalistic repetitive beginning that makes me think of the world from Equilibrium gives way to a chorus that is both settled and impassioned. Daniel is once more magnificent, but I think that should go without saying.

Restless boy sounds electronic and futuristic and almost feels resigned, that is until the mind-drilling “this is just a test” chant and the cacophony of instruments familiar to POS come in. The track ends abruptly, precisely where I would expect it to pick it up, so I guess you can see it as non-conformist and surprising, but to me it just becomes frustrating.

Wait reveals a gentler side of Panther, and between the beautiful piano, the warm classic guitar and the balmy vocals, the anguish and regret are almost palpable.

Like the two previous pieces, Keen to a fault has quite a few electronic elements. And also like the previous, it alternates between minimalistic and intense. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think that the verse is meant to represent the calm controlled image he displays to the world, while the chorus is his real raging self. Or maybe I just don’t want to admit half of the piece is really boring and uneventful.

After toying a bit with nu metal in Tongue of God, they now fully commit to it with Panther (the song). The album-title track is a bit of an odd one. And not just because Daniel is rapping in it. I actually like the verses a lot, catchy and engaging, it’s the chorus that drags it down and it doesn’t help that it’s the kind of obsessive tune that I hummed for a few days after first listening to it. I mean it’s good to have a melody that sticks, but when it’s irritating, sticking is the last thing you want it to do. And yeah, the Panther chorus is pretty grating and goes on forever.

Species toys with moods and intensity, as Pain of Salvation like to do, but the transitions are a lot milder than in If this is the end, for example. Half of the track is a guitar-driven ballad and the other half is Daniel releasing the anger with his acute vocals and “sometimes I hate my fucking species” proclamations.

Icon cements the idea that Panther follows the structure of In the passing light of day, taking the place of the homonym track from the previous release as the 13 minute closer, full of feeling and a genuine admission of hopes and fears. Musically it has a lot more going on than its “sister” song and it alternates between soft, yet anguished and intense and raw, so it’s a lot easier to get into, but maybe lacks some of the depth of ItPLoD. I suppose it’s hard to compete in terms of emotion and honesty with a song written on what one thinks will be his deathbed. And that probably goes for the entire album, not just the closing moment.

It wouldn’t be a Pain of Salvation review without talking about the lyrics. The theme of Panther is being different and not fitting in, which sounds more like a teenage problem than one of an adjusted grown man. So you can excuse my eye rolling after the third “I’m such a wonderful little snowflake” track. But rushing into judgement without fully knowing the context rarely works well, so after digging into the concept of the album, I completely changed my mind. Daniel gave a fantastic interview to Metal Injection (which I encourage you to read here) where he opens up about having ADHD and OCD and how not being diagnosed until recent years affected his life. When you change perspective and see the story of Panther as being on the spectrum vs being normal, it starts to take on a new dimension than just plain “me so special”. Accelerator explains it best through the contrast between “I know what you’re thinking/ I must be the problem here/ I think too fast, talk too loud” and “You know what I’m thinking?/ What if I am not the problem here?/ You think so slow, plan too much”. Exactly the matter of perspective I was talking about.

As I was saying in the beginning, Panther grows on you, especially if you put aside any idea that it might be a logical continuation of In the passing light of day. There’s no weak track, something that you skip or glide by, you can actually remember everything come the next day. The familiar Pain of Salvation style with intensity, angst, dissonance and jumps between various rhythms and moods is still there. Like I mentioned before, the structure is very similar to the previous record, with most songs having a correspondent, but there’s a key difference: after all these spins I still can’t fully connect to Panther. There’s no Iter Impius or On a Tuesday, that piece that is oh-so-brilliant and gut-wrenching and that you can discover more and more of with each listen. It’s a good release, but it’s missing something. I’m tempted to say soul, but we already know Daniel pours everything he has into his music and Panther makes no exception as an extremely personal album. So I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s definitely not the part of POS I’m going to obsess over. “Awesome” is just going to have to do it for this one and we’ll save the “masterpiece” proclamation for another time.