Pain - Coming Home album review

Peter Tägtgren’s industrial metal project comes back online

By Natasha Scharf
( Metal Hammer )
published
Pain - Coming Home album art

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It’s been five years since Pain’s last studio album, not that Peter Tägtgren’s been laying low in the meantime. He’s been touring, producing albums for the likes of Amorphis, Children Of Bodom and Sabaton, and making musical nookie with Rammstein’s Till Lindemann on the boisterous Skills In Pills. Now the Swedish musician-turned-producer has fond the time to ‘come home’ to his industrial metal solo project, which picks up from where You Only Live Twice left off.

Peter has a knack of combining the seemingly incompatible styles and making it work; opener Designed To Piss You Off revisits the country-on-Ketamine vibe of Have A Drink On Me from 2008’s Cynic Paradise and on Absinthe-Phoenix Rising, he takes a trip into the world of psychedelia. Call Me and Starseed both dabble with symphonic orchestration and there’s even a little nepotism with his 17-year-old son Sebastian guesting on drums. Coming Home may not be a groundbreaking release but it is a quality industrial metal one.

Natasha Scharf
Natasha Scharf
Deputy Editor, Prog

Contributing to Prog since the very first issue, writer and broadcaster Natasha Scharf was the magazine’s News Editor before she took up her current role of Deputy Editor, and has interviewed some of the best-known acts in the progressive music world from ELP, Yes and Marillion to Nightwish, Dream Theater and TesseracT. Starting young, she set up her first music fanzine in the late 80s and became a regular contributor to local newspapers and magazines over the next decade. The 00s would see her running the dark music magazine, Meltdown, as well as contributing to Metal Hammer, Classic Rock, Terrorizer and Artrocker. Author of music subculture books The Art Of Gothic and Worldwide Gothic, she’s since written album sleeve notes for Cherry Red, and also co-wrote Tarja Turunen’s memoirs, Singing In My Blood. Beyond the written word, Natasha has spent several decades as a club DJ, spinning tunes at aftershow parties for Metallica, Motörhead and Nine Inch Nails. She’s currently the only member of the Prog team to have appeared on the magazine’s cover.