Paradise Lost: Medusa (2017)

Paradise Lost is very similar to Amorphis in that it is a band that has experimented with a variety of disparate styles over the years and, despite that, I absolutely love everything I have heard from them.  Paradise Lost started out as one of the progenitors of the doom/death metal sound in the U.K. along with My Dying Bride.  Over the years, they added more and more gothic metal elements and began to lose the death metal elements.  Then suddenly, they were just a gothic rock/metal band.  But then, they began returning to their roots more and more.

That brings us to this album, which is basically a doom/death metal album with only occasional gothic metal moments.  So they are back where they started.  From the opening strains of "Fearless Sky", it is clear that Paradise Lost have brought back the slow, lumbering doom.  And that continues throughout the album, with only occasional moments when the band locks into a rollicking groove.  But they never get close to anything like "Once Solemn" from Draconian Times.  It is an extremely dark and slow release that recaptures what made Paradise Lost so great from the very beginning.

The best moments from the album are those in which the vocals alternate between the dry, spine-tingling clean vocals and the gruff, death vocals.  The clean vocals call to mind the time when Paradise Lost experimented with more gothic rock, which they did a lot better than other bands who attempted the switch (looking at you Tiamat).  This comes together perfectly on the gloomily beautiful "The Longest Winter".

Paradise Lost was a band I fell for fairly early on in my metal collecting days, getting Draconian Times for Christmas when I was 15.  That album still ranks as my favorite from the band and one of my favorite albums of all time.  Medusa is a terrific album (Decibel made it their Album of the Year in 2017) that does not come quite close to matching that one, but may very well be my second favorite album by the band.  And beating Gothic is not easy, so that shows the high quality of Medusa.