Band:	Pictures Of Pain
Album:	The Reckoning
Style:	Extreme progressive metal
Release date:	November 2010

01. Betrayal
02. Far Beyond
03. Eternal Rage
04. Deviator
05. Sign Of Times
06. Years Of Disgrace
07. The Reckoning
08. Final State

So we've all seen it before, we've all experienced it, and it's a bitter sweet experience at that. What experience would that be? Something that can be found in many bands, everyone from Opeth to Into Eternity - they come up some outrageously awesome music, or more specifically, outrageously awesome segments, but fail to string them all together in a nice fluid, coherent song a lot of time. It's almost like getting samples of songs thrown at you.

As you may have guessed by this point, Pictures Of Pain suffer from this exact problem. It's almost too eclectic most of the time. There's incredible unpredictable riffing that comes from any genre you can think of - death metal, power metal, traditional heavy, maybe a few touches of doom here and there. The vocals run a perfect mirror alongside the guitars - the most unique being the screams that straddle the line between "Painkiller" Rob Halford and extreme power metal shrieks. That's just one set, there's the forlorn sounding Akerfeldt-esque clean singing, the growls...the list goes on and on.

So basically this album has it all...mellow, aggressive, pounding, tranquil, depressing, uplifting, arousing, heavy and so on. It probably takes a real asshole to bitch about something as creative and varied as this, but this album gives very little time to show it's individual parts. It's like when your sitting in your room chilling out to one of your favourite songs, then one of your friends walks in and switches it halfway through to an equally cool song...Now translate that experience to individual segments rather than separate tracks. Nevertheless, there is no real shit parts on The Reckoning, the musicians are incredible, the song writing is fresh, and the riffs are solid. It all comes down to how well you can cope with that "Hey! I wasn't done rocking out to that riff yet!" feeling.