Paradise Lost - Medusa album review

Upliftingly depressing metal

Cover art for Paradise Lost - Medusa album

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Paradise Lost have never fitted neatly into any category, instead they’ve raged across death metal, doom and goth. So don’t expect Medusa to be a satisfyingly comfortable album with which to engage. But that’s what makes it so enticing.

The band allow the weight and heaviness of the music to nestle up against Nick Holmes’s morbidly atmospheric vocals. Moreover, the gloominess of the instrumentation is offset by the way in which everything glides along on heavy groove rails.

It’s a sumptuously desperate album, with the band ferociously attacking human greed on Until The Grave, a polemic wrapped in thunder, and laying bare the illogic of blind religious faith on both the moribund No Passage For The Dead and the lonely desperation of Gods Of Ancient.

Opener Fearless Sky sets the parameters, with its sludgy tone and crumbling grandeur, and the album retains this high standard throughout.

Darkness to lighten the mood.

Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021