Paradise Lost
Lost Paradise

THE REVIEW

At the roots of an entire way of conceiving a style of making Metal.
This would be the hypothetical title of an equally hypothetical essay on this album.

Indeed, too often we forget about albums like this. Yet their importance for their genre is equal to that of others far more renowned.
Before thousands of pseudo-bands with dubious qualities began to infect the music market with their albums based on the same reheated broth of easy assimilation (sad melodies veiled in dark, a female voice to the point of nausea), there was only a dark movement that would later give birth to much less noteworthy bands. We are in England, in Halifax precisely, the year is 1990, and the genre that is about to be born is the so-called Doom/Death Metal.

The putative fathers are a band of kids (average age 18) called Paradise Lost. After the usual demo tape grind, these young men signed a contract with Peaceville written on the back of an A4 sheet (!?), and within months they published "Lost Paradise". Those of you who only know the recent developments of Nick Holmes' group should know this is a very different band. The album in question is a perfect example of the fusion of Doom and Death styles and, even though it doesn't even remotely reach "Gothic" (their masterpiece), it represents a milestone of the '90s in the Doom field and a fundamental record to understand the evolution of a genre that gave birth to what we now call Gothic Metal.

After a boring and useless intro, the album gets to the heart immediately with Deadly Inner Sense, an excellent song able to fuse the ferocity of avant-garde Death with the slow and morbid parts of Doom.
It is followed closely by the hallucinating Paradise Lost, played on an estranging riff, slow and somewhat atypical but very engaging.
The fourth track is the one that most reveals the Death Metal influences, Our Saviour is a masterpiece that seems to have come out of an Obituary album, a compelling piece with guitars taking center stage.

But while so far the album might appear nice but not over the top, the second part is something that takes your breath away.
The fifth track is the masterpiece of the album: Rotting Misery, a song now legendary for the band's original fans.
Ladies and gentlemen, Doom/Death is served!
The song is based on a slow, morbid, and obsessive riff just right. The sparse and essential production makes this composition even more raw and distressing, not to mention Holmes' growl that seems to come from the underworld (thanks to the incredibly raw production) as he slowly declaims one of the most disturbing lyrics I've ever read.
The sudden acceleration in the central part, adorned with Mackintosh's splendid solo (always brilliant), makes the piece perfect, which is finally closed by the reprise of the main riff and Nick Holmes' growling in crescendo.
It is followed by Frozen Inside, a very beautiful and more melodic track than the others. The seventh track is instead a coup de grace to anyone still doubting the band's validity. Breeding Fear, the shortest track of all but certainly the heaviest, built on steamroller rhythms alternating with cadenced parts (in one verse, the infamous female voice appears for the first time, a choice not very significant). Finally, after the banal instrumental Lost Paradise (note the imaginative choice of titles...), we arrive at Internal Torment II, the concluding track, very Death and notable for the nastiness and aggressiveness of the sounds.

In the end, I find listening to this album is essential, not so much for the quality itself, still high even if a bit derivative, but because it remains, fifteen years after its release, one of the foundations on which a new style of conceiving, playing, and interpreting Heavy Metal music has developed.