Pain Of Salvation - Road Salt Two

I wrote about Pain Of Salvations last album, Road Salt One, quite some time ago now. I talked about the raw emotion, the excellent songwriting, and the fantastic production. It's still one of my favourite albums. And now I there is a sequel, the unsurprisingly titled Road Salt Two.

This is the second half of the Road Salt concept, a pair of albums exploring life, emotion, and human interaction. In many ways, it's more of the same. I could wax lyrical about it in much the same way as Road Salt One because, in truth, it is very, very similar. It's almost a second disk to accompany the first. And this is no bad thing.

The same basic structure is used again, with the recurring theme of "the road" cropping up time and again. But the lyrical themes take a turn here. They are more mature, they are the end of the journey, whereas Road Salt One told of the beginning. The walker isn't walking the road any more. He's sitting, exhausted, and remembering everything that has gone before.

There is a peculiar quality to the production that makes the album feel a lot older than it is. Subtle use of distortion imbues in the listener a sense of nostalgia. The beautifully short, yet poignant, 1979 really pins that nostalgia down. Where Road Salt One was about struggling through life, Road Salt Two is about breaking point. About looking back at what is gone, and facing what has to come.

Some familiar aspects of Road Salt One come back for a second outing. The grizzled blues rock of the walker is back in Of Salt, and the cacophonous, deeply disturbing carnival sound of Wait, Darling, Wait returns in Break, Darling, Break. A suitably painful reworking of the familiar sound.

While the album should be taken as a whole, and all the tracks are superb, there are a number that stand out. The aforementioned 1979 is one, the somewhat disquieting Eleven, and To The Shoreline, which is Road Salt Two's answer to Sisters. The Deeper Cut, Through The Distance and Healing Now are also brilliant songs in their own right.

I'm sure some would be disappointed in the apparent lack of progress since Road Salt One. I'm not. Road Salt Two is exactly what I wanted it to be; a completion of Road Salt One. Not diverging too far to be a different concept, but not similar enough to be the same album all over again. This is the end of the road, and it has been both a pleasure and a heartache to walk it.