#2
Pain of Salvation - Road Salt Two
Ok, so I said
Iconoclast was the highest ranked metal album on my list, but my #2 album is by a band known for being prog metal. Thing is, I don't consider
Road Salt Two, or their aptly named previous album
Road Salt One, to be metal whatsoever. PoS have moved completely on to being pretty much a Prog Rock band, with only moments of the metalesque shining through. Needless to say, this genre shift has lost them a lot of fans in the metal community, especially after their metal-yet-mediocre album
Scarsick in 2007 ended (for now) their saga in progressive metal. Personally, I found
RS1 to be an absolutely amazing album that
RS2 doesn't surpass, but merely ties.
Pain of Salvation aka The Daniel Gildenlow Band have always done tons of different things on every album, but
RS2 does it in a way that seems even more impressive than average. Everything about this album seems... thoughtful almost, and well constructed in composition, arrangement, and performance. Even the very melodies the songs are built around are unique, flowing in bizarre ways that somehow feel completely natural. I seriously love that kind of thing, and
RS2 is chock full of it. Despite definitely not feeling metal overall, it does get dirty and distorted pretty often and even heavy at times, almost in a grungey way - and a lot of the aggressive blues sounds from
RS1 are kept here. But this sounds more like a Pain of Salvation album with the way the songs flow in very loose structure and occasionally climax with absurdly complicated instrumental and vocal segments. And it's crazy but, it's hard for me to describe the different sounds you can here on this album without straight up summarizing all 12 songs individually - but it's still a damn cohesive album with amazing themes. I find it a shame that so many people have given up on PoS when the two
Road Salt albums are some of the best music they have made as a band ever.
Recommended songs:
"
Softly She Cries"
"
Eleven"
"
The Deeper Cut"
"
End Credits"