PARADISE LOST - Shades of God

I don’t know if my colleagues who got the older Paradise Lost albums felt – as I did – how odd it is to listen to music that was made more than ten years ago after listening to and reviewing new albums. Better or worse, that matters less. What I’m talking about here is not the quality of the creative product, but the quality of production. The difference is striking, especially when your ear is only accustomed to crystal-clear sounds, no matter how brilliant or dull the musical ideas.

Moving past this shortcoming, or perhaps due to it, after repeated and almost obsessive listening, I managed to get into the sombre atmosphere of Shades Of God. Let’s see. It has been a year since Gothic, an album I shouldn’t tell you about here, as I’m sure Sake has managed to jog your memory. The Britons are on their third album and have been playing together for four years. Ideas get a more precise shape, technique is improving, Nick Holmes is starting to polish his voice. The music turns more to heavy metal, sometimes more melodic, slowly drifting away from death metal. Female vocals are a thing of the past.

And what is more important, it is becoming obvious that the band likes to experiment and not remain in the same place. Maybe at the time, people did not realize how big the experiment would get with the future Paradise Lost songs. But, in hindsight, considering Icon, Draconian Times, One Second, Host and more recent albums, we can see in Shades Of God a "declaration of independence" – we will never play the same on every album even if we do keep a connection, we will not care what the audiences say about us, we will play as we like and experiment as much as we can. This is how I see Shades of God, thirteen years after its release – a courageous album, with music that is not always good, but with some remarkable songs, written by the band that was about to grow up.

Nebelhexa Nota: 8.5