Yer Metal Is Olde: Pain of Salvation - One Hour by the Concrete Lake

Angry Metal Guy

Music consumption looks much different today than it did in 1999. Hot new radio singles have become algorithmically or otherwise boosted pushes on major streaming services. Deluges of notifications from Bandcamp, Facebook/Instagram, and highly esteemed review sites have supplanted the physical zine scene.¹ Various online chatter spaces with easy methods of sharing links,² information, digital files have plowed over tape-trading, mix-disc swapping, and forcing your friends brazenly to plug into your extreme musical wiles. This is all to say that dates of releases find an easier path to peeping eyes, and archival data sits more completely from a variety of sources. So the oddity that Pain of Salvation’s sophomore album One Hour by the Concrete Lake emerged as the first available album for an majority of release regions just wouldn’t happen in the world of 2024.

Originally released in 1998 via Japanese label Avalon, One Hour wouldn’t make it to Europe and North America until 1999 via InsideOut Music, which also happened to be before that same entity re-issued PoS’s debut, Entropia (1997 release via Avalon). What’s important, though, particularly to the ethos of this kind of feature, is that One Hour explores themes of environmental waste and resource injustice that feel as applicable now as then, however idealistic in view—the liner notes even have environmental studies and other works cited. In this bleeding heart ethos and yet-to-crystalize PoS identity, One Hour, musically, flips about synth tones of metallic moods that fit more with peers of the day Dream Theater and Queensrÿche than earlier (or later) works do. But as the title track breaks way to “Inside,” there’s an undeniable rhythmic persistence that matches vocalist Daniel Gildenlöw’s chiseled and flamboyant persona that, for better or worse, defines all Pain of Salvation releases.

Yet, the idea that Pain of Salvation is a band more of a certain time in style defines the uniqueness that One Hour has to offer. Birthed in a 90s rock and metal scene forever changed by grunge, Pain of Salvation has often had a knack for working muddy and moody guitar sounds about their intricate and intimate works. Blowout tones force tracks like “New Year’s Eve,” “Water,” and “Black Hills” to crash against bright and melodic contrast, which allows triumphant crescendos to squirm into sonically moistened ears. And into these buttered receptacles PoS can also inject the out-of-place, late-album, mostly acoustic ballad “Pilgrim,” ripe with cheese and drama, with the preceding journey through auditory grit helping its brief run feel earned.

Bookended by companion pieces “Inside” and “Inside Out,” One Hour’s structure is not as adventurous as later material,³ but its traditional approach allows its departures and message to come through with an extravagant focus. The early “count this” challenge of “Handful of Nothing” and the last syncopated frenzy of “Shore Serenity” stand out like prog-pinched thumbs against the smoothed-out flow between other tracks. And, in turn, the simpler load of “Water” flowing with a natural grace into “Home” delivers tidy but still tempo-tricky in the high tide of Gildenlöw’s prog-hippie lamentations. One Hour forces itself to bend against its own ideas.

Likewise, One Hour by the Concrete Lake stands in a long line of Pain of Salvation excursions that are reactions to their own work and outside perceptions. With One Hour featuring more double-kick runs than any other album their future would hold, Pain of Salvation set out to show the world that, yes, you can call them metal. And as the proverbial tongue out to that same sentiment, its sappiest features aim to be a quirk in the whole to which one must grow accustomed. One Hour’s early placement in the band’s discography means that it didn’t have to make as hard a left turn as ’07’s Scarsick or the Road Salt albums later would. And in its youth, it playfully flips the sounds that built one side of progressive metal—the Gentle Giant prog mania, the Pink Floyd waning, the amp-toned riffs of classic rock—to be flashy in a way that most modern progressive music isn’t. So if you’ve never snorted the manbun metallers Pain of Salvation, consider One Hour by the Concrete Lake to be your way in like so many accidentally did way back when. And if you’ve overlooked this release in the wake of its more acclaimed follow-ups, well… don’t!⁴



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