Lots of Pain of Salvation fans have the mindset that The Perfect Element and Remedy Lane are better than every other album that they've done.
My advice to someone getting into them would be to at least not buy into that sort of mindset immediately, considering that I wasn't sure what to think of Scarsick at first and now it's my favorite album by them to date. It's not really a change of style as much at it is a change of mindset in Pain of Salvation. The core elements are really still there, but presented in a different way.
Kingdom of Loss, Flame to the Moth, and Enter Rain are also some of the greatest songs ever, by the way.