Band:	Pain
Album:	Dancing With The Dead
Style:	Gothic industrial metal
Release date:	2005
A review by:	jupitreas

01. Don't Count Me Out
02. Same Old Song
03. Nothing
04. The Tables Have Turned
05. Not Afraid To Die
06. Dancing With The Dead
07. Tear It Up
08. Bye, Die
09. My Misery
10. A Good Day To Die
11. Stay Away
12. The Third Wave

No one can deny that Peter Tagtgren is an important person in the world of metal music. Hypocrisy have recorded some classic Death Metal albums and Peter's talents as a producer have helped many bands bring the most out of their music. Unfortunately, Peter's industrial/pop metal band Pain is simply dreadfully wrong and literally a pain to listen to.

First of all, Tagtren's voice is very unsuitable for this kind of music. Obviously he is one of the best growlers around; however, his clean vocals leave a lot to be desired. His one-dimensional performance on this album makes it even less appealing. If the music was good, this could perhaps be forgiven. Sadly, this is not so.

"Same Old Song" is especially embarrasing with its overplayed, comically corny keyboard lines, pathetic lyrics and overtly polished, pop approach. Basically, this is a song so ridiculous that even bands like Dethstars or something would think twice before releasing it. The rest of the album isnt really any better as one cringe-inducing moment follows another. It's an atonal Swede singing lyrics like "We're not afraid to die/We're not afraid to kiss the sky" or "Bye, die" (indeed, the height of being articulate) to a techno beat and overdistorted guitar. At times I could swear I could hear the Backstreet Boys singing in the refrains. This simply cannot be considered good by anyone with any sort of taste. This music should be dumped in the same trash can as the one containing abominations like Zeromancer and VNV Nation.

Unfortunately, I am sure that as a testament to the poor taste of the masses, this album will actually be fairly popular. To those people who might pick up this garbage and think that it is worth anything, I would recommend checking out bands like Gravity Kills, Filter or Stabbing Westward. What they were doing (no less than a decade ago) is seemingly the same thing but they had good vocalists, interesting lyrics, intriguing musical ideas and were not blatantly commercial-sounding and trivial.

Mr. Tagtgren - its nice that you are trying to create music in various styles but please do us all a favor and leave these abominations that you create on the side in your head and concentrate on making Hypocrisy the ground-breaking Death Metal juggernout that it once was...