When Nicke Andersson first left Entombed to concentrate 100% on The Hellacopters, the future of his old band was left totally up in the air. C'mon, what do you do when one of your founding members and main songwriters leaves? The pressure was on, to say the least. So when the new album "Same difference" finally was released in 1998 with new drummer Peter Stjärnvind, a lot of people were especially critical of the record. Now, I'm not gonna come out and say that everyone was wrong, but I do think they were unjustly harsh. While it's obviously not the best thing they've ever done, it's still nowhere near as bad as a lot of those initial reviews would have you believe. Coming out after the fuzzy death n' roll onslaught of 1997's "To ride, shoot straight and speak the truth", "Same difference" was a study in contrasts. The production was significantly cleaner and the playing was much more subdued, though tighter. It was the sound of a band in transition, trying to figure out where to go next. Yeah, there's some definite clunkers on the record, but I think that it hold up well regardless. It doesn't help that the tracklist is totally front-loaded, but it works just fine on shuffle. And ignore those five bonus tracks on the US version - they were much better off left as a separate disc on the "TRSSASPTT" limited edition digipack. So anyhow, as you should know, I love me some country music along with my death metal. So when Entombed throws some downtuned slide guitar into the mix, you bet your ass I'm all about it as on today's track "Clauses". It still might not be enough to redeem all of "Same difference", but hopefully it'll at least make you go back and rethink it.