By Carl Begai
Amongst metal’s heaviest, darkest and meanest diehards Peter Tägtgren is known first and foremost as the frontman and founder of Hypocrisy, then as a producer who has racked up time in his Abyss Studio since 1995 with seemingly every metal band under the sun. There’s no getting past the fact, however, that his greatest success to date is his mainstream-ish electro-industrial outfit Pain. Originally launched as a one-man pet project in 1997, Pain now boasts a real band line-up and eight albums in their catalogue with no brick walls to slow them down in sight. The newest outing, Coming Home, is distinctly Swede-powered Pain boasting its fair share of surprises, from releasing its sick-riff heaviest track (“Call Me”) as the lead single, to an unexpected guest vocalist, to some serious balladeering on the title track. And clean singing. Lots of it.
During the five year gap between You Only Live Twice (2011) and Coming Home, Pain did a decent amount of touring and Peter succeeded in blindsiding the metal community by teaming up with seemingly reclusive Rammstein frontman Till Lindemann. The duo released the Lindemann debut, Skills And Pills, backed by some huge label confidence and promotional firepower, guaranteeing that everyone heard about Lindemann whether they liked the Pain-Stein sound of the project or not.
“It was great, we had the time of our lives,” Peter laughs. “Just two idiots out in the world doing promotion and it was great. We had such a blast. It’s a memory for life. We started with one song and we all know how it ended. It was amazing. Till is fucked up which is why we fit together (laughs). There were no rules for anything when we made the album. It was all ‘follow your heart.'” Continue reading BraveWords Interview: PAIN – Designed To Piss You Off
Rammstein’s latest platter of tongue-in-cheek violence, Liebe Is Für Alle Da (translated: Love Is For Everyone), proves that so long as you have a singer that should be in theatre and a killer producer it’s possible to write the same songs over and over again and still be successful. The band continues along their tried and true crunching industrial demolition path, relying on their traditional “big, bigger, biggest, Rammstein” execution to grab you by the throat and drag you in. Indeed it does, with an iron fist. First three songs ‘Rammlied’, ‘Ich Tu Dir Weh’ (I’ll Hurt You’) and ‘Waidmanns Heil’ (‘Hunter’s Salute’) are predictable Rammstein anthems that succeed through larger-than-life production / engineering; nothing mindblowing but mean and intense when listened at a proper unhealthy volume. Fourth track in, however, things start to become twisted. ‘Haifisch’ (‘Shark’) sounds like it was yanked off a mid-‘80s Depeche Mode album for kids, followed by the eyebrow-raisingly brutal ‘B********’ complete with a death-vocal chorus courtesy of frontman Til Lindemann. And with each trip through the record it become increasingly apparent that this is Lindemann’s show. As heard-it-all-before as the music may seem at times, he’s able to give each song serious depth, dark or humourous or up-yours brazen. Make no mistake, unlike 10 years ago the man can sing.