Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Release date: May 15, 2020
Production: Jaime Gomez Arellano
Album length: 45.35 min
Genre: Doom Metal/Death Metal/Gothic Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
Paradise Lost can’t surprise us anymore, but they can still make a good new album every single time. Even after 30 years in the game. Then again, let me not jinx it too early. In statements around the single for the new song Ending Days, Nick Holmes teased the audience a bit, probably without meaning to, when he said outright that its arrangement shows the band members’ fondness for eighties acts like Sisters of Mercy, among others. That probably caused a fair bit of panic among the part of the fanbase that never quite made peace with the band’s in-between artsy era, which was marked out by the album “One Second”. Luckily, it stayed at that. The metal innovators and founders of gothic metal, without whom it’s hard to imagine a whole pile of acts who drew from Paradise Lost, Type O Negative included, keep up everything they artistically returned to over the past decade with the new album too. With their sixteenth in a row, “Obsidian”, they’ve once again put out a damn good piece of work, one that sensibly ties in with the essence of the cult classics from the nineties, like the timeless achievements “Icon” and “Draconian Times”. So yes. Nothing new, ultimately. Paradise Lost keep stubbornly using their own formula, a musical recipe with fascinating potency and a predatory expressive-aesthetic reach, the way no other band on the planet pulls it off. Anyone who knows the band and generally likes them stopped reading here and went off to more useful pursuits of the day, like putting on “Obsidian” right away, among other things.
“Obsidian” is the third Paradise Lost album in a row since “The Plague Within” where Nick Holmes combines vocal lines within a single song, vividly and unmistakably, mixing bestially thundering, demonically magnetic growls with normal singing, which naturally evokes a higher level of musicality. It’s that winning, singular combination stemming from the original form of death metal, into which Paradise Lost have always so strikingly and charmingly worked elements of furrowed doom melancholy and gothic theatrical blackness, without any obscene clutter of possible kitsch. This is a new, sincere ceremony of mourning with the highest yield of gloom. The alternating vocal maneuvers from the caustic, black-hearted Holmes are the winning factor behind the vivid shifts in mood within one and the same song. Guitarist Greg MacKintosh, meanwhile, once again fascinates immensely with the predatory effect of the all-round placed tricks of minimalism in his by now very well-known guitar playing, whether it’s a riff, a decorative ornament above it, or a solo in the mid-eight passage. Paradise Lost don’t mess with this form either. Not by an inch. Two verses, two choruses, a mid-eight “interlude” and, if need be, at most one more verse, plus the obligatory closing chorus. A cemented form that’s predictable, sure, but on “Obsidian” too it (again and again) ignites, because it manifests in the spirit of the band’s unique sound. It has always fascinated, and it’s incredible how MacKintosh never runs out of penetrating ideas for crafting that strikingly minimalist phrasing. Judging by the title, “Obsidian” is also exactly what the name reveals. A synonym for the band’s unyielding stance of musical visionarism, founded on MacKintosh’s endlessly inspired arsenal for forging rock-heavy, gravitating, ominously rolling guitar phrases, which remain a constant.
Holmes is still obsessed with his contrite stance before the almighty heavenly creator. He dedicates some of his martyr-like lyrics of “bitter repentance” to it, as we find in The Devil Embraced, Forsaken, Ghosts or Fall From Grace. In this respect the man could perhaps step down from his immovable, god-fearing obsession and let Paradise Lost’s poetry make room for some other themes too. But that isn’t even all that essential, because the songs are everything you expect from Paradise Lost and, ultimately, everything you want from your starting pose as a fan of the band. The songs are generally pretty similar to each other, which was to be expected, but the album grabs you right away with the opening trio of Darker Thoughts, Fall From Grace and Ghosts, which put you under the spell of their godless theater’s witchcraft. Ending Days, which smells gothic in the second half of the album, develops the most theatrical musicality, with Holmes addressing us purely with clean singing, and the track delivers a predatory chorus. As a special feature of the album, it’s also a welcome catalyst that flips the otherwise merciless mood of the record and boosts its dynamic side, the howl of a fatally hollowed-out primate. The album closes with yet another classic Paradise Lost peak in Ravenghast, where the added piano motif, a kind of essential gloomy dessert, coexists in an utterly conciliatory dialogue with one of Greg MacKintosh’s best and most striking guitar performances on the new album.
No two ways about it. Once again, this is the real Paradise Lost album: it sends sacral shivers down your spine and spins a demonically alluring magnetism with a touch of the kiss of death, in which the soul of frozen hopelessness gratefully sinks into an endless ocean of mourning, yet never drowns in it. At what they do, Paradise Lost are simply put the kings of their trade, wielding a magic all their own, one that strikes fear into the bones of even the Lord of the Flies himself, so much so that he’d rather convert into an angel. This cult, legendary, pioneering band from the British Isles has, then, fulfilled its mission once more with flying colors.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Darker Thoughts
2. Fall From Grace
3. Ghosts
4. The Devil Embraced
5. Forsaken
6. Serenity
7. Ending Days
8. Hope Dies Young
9. Ravenghast
Lineup:
Nick Holmes – vocals
Greg Mackintosh – guitar
Aaron Aedy – guitar
Steve Edmondson – bass guitar
Waltteri Väyrynen – drums
Guest musicians:
Alicia Nurho – violin on tracks 1 and 7
Heather Mackintosh – backing vocals on track 8
