Even the most skeptical Paradise Lost fan had to admit that for more than a decade already the band has been riding an unseen creative wave that makes each album even better than the one before.
Around the turn of the century they were stuck in an artistic impasse, a stylistic labyrinth that they slowly crawled out of with their self-titled album in 2005, which verily heralded a new beginning for the band. Where on the four preceding albums they did their utmost best not to sound like Paradise Lost at all to varying degrees of commercial success; with that record they wholly embraced once again their newfound love for their own style and history. Each consecutive record saw them travelling back further in time across their own catalogue, all the while not forgetting the things they learned along the way. For instance, Nick only really learned how to sing on the unjustly much maligned ‘Host’, a skill he continued to develop and can combine effortlessly now along with his newly unearthed trademark grunts and growls. This has culminated now in ‘Medusa’, their first record from their newly signed contract with Nuclear Blast. Even more than 2015’s ‘The Plague Within’, it is a godsend for everyone that still holds ‘Gothic’ up as one of the pinnacles of death doom in the nineties. Perhaps playing the album in full two years ago for the Roadburn Festival lead to a deeper appreciation of their own classic as you can feel its presence in many a note. Just listen to ‘From the Gallows’, for example. Even the painted cover looks positively old school with a monochromatic with on a bright purple background that comes from the same cloth as the Saint Vitus’ classic ‘Born Too Late’. If you had told anyone Greg & co would ever write a bonafide death doom album like this again ten years ago, they would have laughed at you very loudly and then probably quietly and secretly started weeping afterwards, for such a thing could never be, could it?
Tracklist:
1. Fearless Sky
2. Gods Of Ancient
3. From The Gallows
4. The Longest Winter
5. Medusa
6. No Passage For The Dead
7. Blood and Chaos
8. Until The Grave
Label: Nuclear Blast
9.5/10
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