PARADISE LOST — Shades of God (review)

PARADISE LOST — Shades of God album cover Album · 1992 · Doom Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Warthur
This album finds Paradise Lost transitioning between their early death-doom style towards a more accessible style with greater mass appeal. The intent of this new direction - namely, to grow their popularity by shifting out of the intriguing but admittedly rather niche musical world they had crafted with their early work - couldn't be more evident on opening song Mortals Watch the Day, which combines riffs appropriate for the more mainstream Black Sabbath or Trouble albums with a vocal performance which has shades (hah!) of their earlier gruesome death metal growling but which are close to a more mainstream shout.

So, coming at this from the mould-spattered darkness and glacial, almost funeral doom-esque riffs of Gothic, I found this a hard sell - but curiously, it's come to grow on me a lot. Yes, they're presenting a much more accessible face to the world this time around - but that's an illusion, with extensive twists and turns working their way into their sound and an almost quasi-progressive sense of throwing unexpected shifts and changes into songs. Though still clearly in some respects a transitional work, it's one I hold in higher estimation than I used to now.
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