Paradise Lost – “Medusa” [Album Review]

As a huge fan of Paradise Lost, I have been highly anticipating the release of their new record Medusa. The band’s 2015 offering, The Plague Within, was one of my favorite albums of that year and is still in regular rotation on my player so when I sat down with Medusa the bar was set quite high; perhaps too high.

As a whole Medusa has a much slower, much heavier, doomier sound than their previous records. It opens with “Fearless Sky” which kicks things off with a great riff bringing with it the promise of a killer listening experience. However, clocking in at 8:30 minutes, this sludgy tune seemed a bit too long and drawn out and it never got the blood flowing. The same can be said for the following track, “Gods of Ancient,” which again is sludgier than I had expected. The riff is awesome and the guttural vocals are good but it failed to grab me by the balls and make me take notice.

Not until the third song, “From The Gallows,” did I connect with the record and felt the band had gotten back to true form with the fantastic mixture of riffs, guttural vocals and melodic guitars breaks that we have come to expect. From here on out Medusa is pretty solid and gets better as you progress through it with “The Longest Winter” and “Until the Grave” standing out as crushing favorites.

Perhaps my expectations were set a bit too high, I am not sure, but at the end of the day Medusa has a few flaws that keeps it from being a stellar record. With that being said, I think fans of the band will appreciate what they have done here and should definitely check it out.

Medusa Track Listing:

01. Fearless Sky
02. Gods of Ancient
03. From The Gallows
04. The Longest Winner
05. Medusa
06. No Passage For The Dead
07. Blood and Chaos
08. Until The Grave
09. Shrines
10. Symbolic Virtue

Run Time: 57:03
Release Date: September 1, 2017

Check out the lyric video for the song “The Longest Winter”