Pain - Dancing With The Dead (LP) - Blue Vinyl Vinyl

Peter Tägtgren has a knack for welding steel-plated riffs to pop-minded hooks, but Dancing With The Dead is where that chemistry really snapped into focus. Released in 2005 under the Pain banner, it arrived after years of Tägtgren building a parallel life to Hypocrisy, producing half of Scandinavia at The Abyss and quietly perfecting this industrial metal engine. The result feels lean, cold to the touch, and strangely emotive. It is also a record shaped by a jolt of mortality; Tägtgren has said in interviews that a brief heart stoppage inspired the title and some of the writing, which explains why the songs keep circling fear, routine, and the fight to feel alive.

If you know one track here, it is probably Same Old Song. That chorus sticks after a single pass, a big singalong welded to a stomping kick and glassy synths. It worked in clubs and on rock radio, and it earned the project attention well beyond the metal faithful. The verses carry that classic Tägtgren sneer, but the production does a lot of the storytelling. Guitars bite in short, clipped phrases so the sequenced low end can breathe, and the snare is snapped tight, almost electronic, without losing weight. It is pop construction treated with rivets and solvents.

The title track is the other pillar. Dancing With The Dead opens with a pulse you feel in your chest, then layers in minor-key keys and a riff that grinds forward with grim intent. Tägtgren’s vocal is double-tracked just enough to feel haunted. He does not over-sing. He trusts a simple, fatalist melody and lets the arrangement do the lifting, sliding in little filter sweeps and string pads that glide under the chorus. Bye/Die goes harder, heavier guitars chewing through a straight, martial beat, but even that one tucks a hook where you do not expect it. This is a record that understands the power of contrast: lockstep rhythms, then a sudden bit of shimmer; a harsh lyric, then a melody that feels almost tender.

As usual for Pain, this is essentially a one-man operation. Tägtgren wrote it, played the bulk of the instruments, programmed the electronics, and produced it at The Abyss. You can hear the control in the drum programming, which lands with the precision of a well-oiled press, and in the guitar tone, which sits just outside the center to leave room for the sub and the synths. There is a lot going on, yet the mixes feel uncluttered. He balances the metallic and the synthetic like someone who has spent a lifetime at a console. That studio brain is all over the little choices too, like the gated breaths that lead into a chorus or the way a backing vocal will evaporate just as the cymbals bloom.

Dancing With The Dead did well at home and pulled new listeners across Europe, and that tracks when you listen now. It bridges scenes. Fans of Rammstein and later-era Ministry hear the discipline in the drum lines, while goth and EBM heads get plenty of neon gloom to move to. Metal fans latch onto the riffs because they come from someone who actually writes riffs, not loops that just happen to be distorted. There is a reason this record turns up in conversations about 2000s industrial metal holding power.

If you are hunting for Dancing With The Dead vinyl, it is worth the chase. The low-end throb and those tight kicks feel great on a good system, and the slight grit in the guitars sits right in the pocket. Pain vinyl in general tends to reward volume, and this one loves a loud room. For collectors who buy Pain records online, keep an eye out for clean copies; the quiet passages reveal surface noise fast. If you are building a shelf of Pain albums on vinyl, this pairs neatly with Nothing Remains the Same on one side and Psalms of Extinction on the other, a tidy snapshot of Tägtgren’s mid-2000s stride. And whether you are crate-digging in a Melbourne record store or browsing vinyl records Australia late at night, this is the one I nudge friends toward when they ask where to start.

What makes it stick, years later, is how human it feels inside the chrome shell. Tägtgren writes about repetition and numbness like someone who has stared them down in a studio at three in the morning, then he sneaks in a melody that says maybe, just maybe, there is a way out. Put it on when you need that mix of menace and lift, when you want to stomp around the living room and then look out the window a little longer than usual. Dancing With The Dead still sparks.