Pain – You Only Live Twice

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The multi-talented Peter Tägtgren continues to juggle his heavy schedule producing other bands with his death metal outfit Hypocrisy and his industrial project Pain, and just as he changed up the formula on the last Hypocrisy album, so he’s done the same with the latest Pain offering. After completing the album Tägtgren revealed it would be the heaviest Pain album so far but to say it’s really any heavier than Cynic Paradise, the last Pain record, wouldn’t really be fair. It is certainly one of their most relentlessly aggressive albums so far, with no departures like Have A Drink On Me, for instance, but it’s not really any heavier. Video single Dirty Woman is as close to a straight hard rock track as Pain get (albeit with certain Slipknot qualities to the main riff), complete with unexpectedly AC/DC-ish vocals from Tägtgren, and he breaks into a higher vocal elsewhere from time to time, but otherwise this album is pure Pain; heavy industrial riffs, melody and anger. What that does mean it is doesn’t have as much variation as Cynic Paradise, it’s perhaps a purer Pain album than that, and after Psalms of Extinction and Cynic Paradise, that’s probably what they needed to make. Fans of the first couple of albums will thoroughly enjoy this modernised take on the same attitude.

Written by Andy Lye
More: 2011, Albums, Industrial, Quick.Play Reviews, Pain