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.
