In October 0f 2017, the Culture Tsar hopped on a plane bound for Helsinki, Finland to see his favorite band, Paradise Lost, live in concert for the first time. The trip to Helsinki was great for a number of reasons, but this isn’t a post about the travel experience. Rather, it’s a semi-detailed overview of every Paradise Lost album released over the band’s nearly thirty-year long career. Unfortunately, Paradise Lost isn’t terribly well known in the United States, which is why the Culture Tsar had to fly to Finland to see them. Mentioning them as a favorite band inevitably draws confused looks that range from complete ignorance to feigned interest. Hopefully this retrospective will provide a helpful starting point for discovering one of the best bands that never managed to break through with US audiences.
While Paradise Lost could be categorized into any number of metal subgenres, it’s probably best to simply refer to them as a metal band given the wide range of musical styles they’ve adopted over the years. For as much as they’ve changed, however, their career can be organized into three broad “eras” consisting of five albums each: the “Doom” Era, the “Dark Rock” Era, and the “Neo-Doom” era.
Today we’ll take a look at Paradise Lost’s early doom period. The Culture Tsar has put together a Spotify playlist featuring two highlights from each album to help you get a sense of how the band’s sound has changed over time. Click here to check it out.
The “Doom” Era
Paradise Lost helped to pioneer the genre known as “doom metal,” which sounds something like regular death metal played at 1/4 speed with a lot of goth trappings filling in the empty space. Where metal bands like Iron Maiden “gallop” and bands like Metallica “run”, doom-era Paradise Lost crawls. The guitar riffs are almost too heavy to move fast, with each chord barely able to lumber out of the way of the one behind it. With every release, however, the tempo picked up slightly and the songwriting sharpened. By the end of this era, Paradise Lost had gone from a somewhat sloppy, lo-fi garage band playing in dingy pubs to a tight, full-throttle metal machine seemingly destined to play to sold out stadiums for the next decade…
Lost Paradise (1990): Raw, ugly, and loud as hell, Lost Paradise evokes a bygone era of low fidelity metal albums recorded in cramped basements and adorned with hand drawn artwork (don’t let the fact it was recorded in an actual studio get in the way of a perfectly good vibe). The album is rough and the songwriting is crude at times, but you can definitely make out the beginnings of something amidst the growling vocals and sludgy guitars.
Standout Tracks: “Rotting Misery”, “Frozen Illusion”
Gothic (1991): The band’s breakthrough album, Gothic is a true doom metal classic that helped to define the genre. While much of the album is an evolution its predecessor, the title track’s musical arrangement and female backing vocals signaled that Paradise Lost was doing something very different from their contemporaries. As its name suggests, Gothic introduced a variety of influences from the heavier, underground side of 80s goth music. The sound is still pretty rough around the edges, but the songwriting is much tighter and you can hear a distinctive style taking shape.
Standout Tracks: “Gothic”, “Eternal”
Shades of God (1992): A massive leap in terms of recording quality and songwriting, Shades of God sounds like a young band hitting its stride. While the songs retain the heaviness of the first two albums, there’s more of a melodic aspect that lends a newfound sense of urgency to the music. While Gothic wallows in its riffs and rhythms, Shades of God stalks the wilderness looking for blood. Despite having much higher production values, there’s a nasty tinge to the album that makes it feel dangerous and unpredictable. The album’s biggest hit, “As I Die”, wasn’t included on the first pressing because it didn’t seem to match the tone of the other songs. Ironically, more than any other track, “As I Die” offered the best glimpse of the band’s future.
Standout Tracks: “As I Die”, “Pity the Sadness”
(NOTE: There’s something screwy with Shades of God on Spotify. Many of the tracks sound like the recordings from the 1995 At the BBC sessions rather than the original album versions. The YouTube listings for these songs suffer the same problem. No idea what’s going on here, but you’ll have to take The Culture Tsar’s word for it that the original album recording sounds much better than the tracks on Spotify.)
Icon (1993): If you put a gun to The Culture Tsar’s head and asked him to name his favorite Paradise Lost album, he’d probably name this one (but he might not lying to himself). While Shades of God is a great metal album, Icon is a great Paradise Lost album. It’s the first album they recorded that you can’t imagine any other band making. The songwriting is simply light years beyond anything on their previous albums. While still bone crushingly heavy, the songs have a better melodic structure, the vocals are a little less harsh, and the tempo is a bit livelier. Greg Mackintosh’s lead guitar work really comes into its own on this album, showcasing a very distinctive sound and evenhanded style that would set him apart from his more showy contemporaries. This was the first Paradise Lost album with songs that had some semblance of pop sensibility, by which I mean they were catchy enough to get stuck in your head. The first track, “Ember’s Fire,” remains one of their absolute best songs and still sounds monstrous almost 25 years later.
Standout Tracks: “Ember’s Fire”, “Dying Freedom”
Draconian Times (1995): This is the big one. Often referred to as Paradise Lost’s “Black Album” (a reference to Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album which catapulted them to superstar status), Draconian Times is in many ways an evolution of Icon. It takes everything Icon did well and does it better. The songs are tighter and faster overall, part of which no doubt resulting from the addition of a new drummer (just compare the drum track of “Hallowed Land” to any previous song to get a sense of the difference). Draconian Times would go on to become their most successful album. Although not The Culture Tsar’s favorite, it holds a special place in his heart because he first learned of the band around the age of 15 from a Draconian Times era feature written up in some music magazine at the grocery store (the feature was titled “The British Metallica” or something equally crass). When he finally bought his first Paradise Lost album from a second hand music store around 1997, it was Draconian Times. Besides, Draconian Times easily ranks among the best names ever for a metal album. Fortunately, the album itself is worthy of the name.
Standout Tracks: “Hallowed Land”, “Shadow Kings”
Be sure to come back tomorrow for part two of The Culture Tsar’s Paradise Lost retrospective covering the “Dark Rock” era.
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