Paradise Lost Annotated Milton

Hailed as ‘The European Metallica’, the 1995 masterpiece solidified the British band’s position at the top table of British metal. With some success already in the bag, the band’s rising status allowed them to deliver their most accomplished sound to date, and a collection of songs that are magnificently heavy, but with a cool, gothic sheen. It remains Paradise Lost’s most acclaimed and adored body of work, and era of the band. The CD also sees the band open their vaults and provide a version that comes with an extra disc of bonus and rare, unreleased material from the Draconian Times era. The 25th Anniversary edition features the re-mastered mix of 2011’s Legacy CD. It also comes furnished with new liner notes from journalist and long standing fan Nick Ruskell, a never seen before deep dive into the record’s lyrics and themes from vocalist Nick Holmes, and memories from the band.

British band Paradise Lost has a knack for producing dark and moody, yet very accessible metal. And that's exactly what they do on Believe in Nothing, serving up a bunch of tracks that could appeal to a wide range of music fans. Tight and melodic, "Mouth" is an excellent example of how to write a chart-topping rock song. In fact, almost exactly the same thing could be said about "Fader" and "Illumination." "Look at Me Now" is also a noteworthy tune, but probably a little too easy on the ear and thus lacking staying power. The suitably sullen "Never Again," on the other hand, gets better with each spin. In the end, Believe in Nothing doesn't quite scale the same heights as a couple of the band's previous releases, such as Shades of God and One Second…

Last fall, British metal legends PARADISE LOST exorcised the demons and ghosts of a dreary dry spell without concerts and thrilled the world with their stunning livestream "At The Mill". Today, the band is proud to announce the captured testimony of this special night to be relaeased as live album…

Doom legends Paradise Lost continue to churn out albums of high quality and The Plague Within delivers the goods. They meld their signature Doom Metal with their more angry, Death Metal stylings. They open the album with the very melodic "No Hope In Sight" and follow it up with a much more aggressive cut "Terminal". The album definitely gets more and more old school as it goes along integrating guttural vocals to the aggression. Other highlights include "Punishment Through Time", the blistering "Flesh From Bone" and "Cry Out". Another solid album from the prolific Paradise Lost.

In the scope of Paradise Lost's career, their eponymous release from 2005 represented the act of Hell freezing over, for it witnessed these founders of the British doom movement finally deigning to revive the sonic blueprint that made them famous in the first place, nearly a decade after seemingly abandoning it forever. Still, the general consensus was that its songs didn't quite match the band's good intentions, and so it fell to its 2007 successor, the aptly named In Requiem, to make amends and come just a few steps closer to resurrecting Paradise Lost's post-death/doom, goth-inflected middle period (marked by the classic Shades of God, Icon and Draconian Times albums)…

Following 2007's In Requiem, the renowned Yorkshire gothic metal outfit return with their 12th studio album, Faith Divides Us Death Unites Us; its title stemming from vocalist Nick Holmes's views on the futility of war in the name of religion. Opting to work this time with Jens Bogren (Opeth, Katatonia) instead of long-term producer Rhys Fulber, Paradise Lost have picked up the heavier parts of the last album and run with them, resulting in a set of downtuned, seven-stringed, crushingly weighty, yet melodic and atmospheric tracks that hark back to their doom metal roots.

Paradise Lost's career trajectory comes virtually full circle on 2009's Faith Divides Us - Death Unites Us, an album that sees the British metal veterans resuming virtually the exact same accessible goth doom style that characterized their most commercially and critically successful albums, in essence making it sound like the would-be successor to 1995's Draconian Times. Of course, in the real world, that successor was 1997's One Second, which initiated the group's often still remarkable but widely underrated voyage into a decade's worth of electro-goth rock experiments before the start of its metallic "rehabilitation" via a tentative eponymous set in 2005 and its far more focused follow-up, In Requiem, a couple of years later…

Obsidian… dark, reflective and black: it’s a pretty decent description of the music that Paradise Lost have been making over the last 32 years, even though this most resilient of British metal bands have stoically refused to be pinned down to one easily defined formula. Powered by a lust for creativity and a stout devotion to haunting heaviness, Paradise Lost have defied the odds by coming back stronger than ever over the past decade.
From the deceptive elegance and dual atmospheres of opener "Darker Thoughts" through to the crushing, baroque doom of war-torn closer "Ravenghast", Obsidian reveals a band in masterful control of a broad array of vital ideas.