Review: PAIN, Fleece

With Halloween on the horizon, there’s no better time for an outbreak of German horror metal. The Vision Bleak are fronted by a pasty-faced, sonorously-voiced fella named Konstanz, who seems to have modelled his entire appearance on Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys. At first, their sound cleaves uncomfortably closely to sulky, risible ’80s English goth, but perks up considerably once the metal riffage kicks in. After Night of the Living Dead, things take a turn for the agreeably atmospheric and Lovecraftian. One has to admire any band that gets the Fleece chanting: “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fthagn!“

Equally worthy of our admiration is any musician who clearly gives not a single flying fuck about the opinions of fans and trolls alike. Of course, Peter Tagtgren has the luxury of not relying on live performance or record sales for his income, having been responsible for producing many of the key Scandinavian metal albums of the last 20 years. Resplendent in his straitjacket outfit, he kicks off PAIN‘s first ever Bristol show with Designed to Piss You Off, which also opens new album Coming Home, its twangy country-style guitar raising a defiant middle finger to purists. In the studio, PAIN is a one-man musical project, in which multi-talented Tagtgren plays all the instruments. But tonight he’s joined by a pair of well-drilled hairy/beardy lags on guitar and bass, plus an unfeasibly fresh-faced long-haired youth holding down a metronomic techno beat behind a bizarre drum kit arrangement that includes a side-mounted bass drum. This turns out to be Tagtgren’s son, Sebastian. (We’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing. Next month, the Bierkeller presents Phil Campbell and the Bastard Sons, comprising the fecund former Motorhead guitarist and his, er, allegedly illegitimate offspring.)

PAIN’s stock-in-trade is electro-industrial/techno-metal with occasionally jarring broken English lyrics, as evidenced by the stompalong likes of Suicide Machine. But Tagtgren isn’t afraid of strong pop hooks, welding a chunky Rammstein riff to a huge earworm chorus in The Great Pretender. A Wannabe and Black Knight Satellite – possibly the only song ever written about the extra-terrestrial conspiracy theory –  showcase his symphonic metal leanings, presumably influenced by all that touring with Nightwish. The acoustic guitar comes out for Coming Home, a lament for lost youth which is as close as PAIN get to sensitive power balladry. But there’s no danger of things getting too serious up there, as Call Me and the utterly bizarre Pain in the Ass, which may or may not be a paean to the pleasures of anal sex, wallow in the same tongue-in-cheek grotesquery he brought to Lindemann’s enjoyably reprehensible Skills in Pills album.

The show draws to a close with those huge chart hits (in, er, Sweden) Same Old Song and Shut Your Mouth, whose early millennial bleepiness and huge chugging riff incites a headbanging frenzy on stage and off. Tagtgren might be playing in much smaller venues than many of his production clients, such as the Academy-headlining Sabaton, but he’s clearly having a ball during his escape from the claustrophobic confines of the recording studio.

Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: October 2016