Got this one from Anteater:
Pain of Salvation-Entropia (1997)
Prog-metal has always been a pretty polarizing genre for me, and this album isn't an exception. I had a friend in high school who listened to a lot of Symphony X, I guess you could loosely compare this album to that although there are differences. This album is downright funky at points, with slap-bass on multiple songs and constant time-signature changes similar to what you might expect from a math-rock band. Also, Entropia does a fairly good job of attempting to balance out the heavy songs with some lighter moments.
There are a few things that tripped me up with this album. As with a lot of music in this particular genre, the vocals were difficult for me to get past. Since this is a concept album revolving around a father being forced to go off and fight in a war and leave his family behind, some of the songs (Oblivion Ocean is the main one I remember) rely on the vocals and the lyrics to keep things going, which didn't do much for me. The singer (Daniel Gildenlow) does have great range though, and when the band was rocking out with him IMO his voice fit in much better (such as on People Passing By, the high point of the album for me).
This album did have a few really cool moments (People Passing By, the intro to Stress), but overall I often found myself getting hung up on the vocals too much to be able to enjoy the instrumentation, which was solid when it kicked in. Good listen though as I probably wouldn't have found this one on my own. Thanks Anteater!