Vocalist Rob the Witch comments:
“It’s not what we gain in this life, but what we have lost as living beings that lost their way in conforming against our true nature to fit in a world that in reality is just an illusion.”
NECRONOMICON – “Paradise Lost” (Official Track)
NECRONOMICON have furthermore revealed the album cover of ‘UNUS’, together with the tracklist. Both can be found below. The cover art has been created by Simon Bossert.
Tracklist
1. From Ashes into Flesh (04:23)
2. Infinitum Continuum (05:27)
3. Paradise Lost (04:55)
4. The Price of a Soul (01:56)
5. Singularis Dominus (04:50)
6. The Thousand Masks (03:20)
7. Ascending The throne of Baator (04:54)
8. Fhtagn (01:59)
9. Cursed MMXIX (04:13)
10. Vox Draconis (04:13)
Total playing time: 0:40:10
Montreal’s premier blackened death metallers are back with ‘UNUS’, the crushing and cinematic follow up to 2016’s ‘Advent of the Human God’. With each record NECRONOMICON has created in the span of their 31-year career, the band has steadily evolved in both sound and power; ‘UNUS’ is no exception to this.
Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary grimoire, NECRONOMICON formed in 1988 by founding guitarist and singer Rob “The Witch” in the deep, northern part of Canadian province Quebec, Fjord of Saguenay. Since then, the band have carefully released each full-length without haste, allowing them to perfect every nuance before unleashing their sonic assaults upon the masses. In 2019, NECRONOMICON was presented with a certificate of honor for over 30 years of service via H.S. production/Tommy Tremblay, and the people of Saguenay Lac St Jean, making them the second band after VOIVOD to ever receive this honor.
‘UNUS’ is a searing cacophony of blistering riffs, machine-like drums, and a symphonic ambience, culminating in a sound that calls to various metal icons such as DIMMU BORGIR, SEPTICFLESH, BEHEMOTH, and DEICIDE. The record combines the furious elements of death metal with the orchestral prowess of black metal, creating the perfect synthesis of both genres. Standout tracks like “Paradise Lost” and “Singularis Dominus” only solidify NECRONOMICON’s ability to continuously produce high quality metal that’s just as dark and brutal as it is elegant.
Line-up
Rob the Witch: Guitar/vocals
Divider: drums
www.facebook.com/NecronomiconMetal
https://www.instagram.com/necronomicon_ca
Recorded at Sliver Wings studio, produced by Rob The Witch
Mixed and mastered at Darth Mader music studio by Logan Mader (Machinehead)
Recording line-up:
Rob the Witch: Guitar/vocals/bass
Divider: drums
Special feature: Geirlioz (Dimmu Borgir) on Piano in ”From Ashes Into Flesh”.
Artwork: Dragon caducea design by Nestor Avalos, layout and artwork by Simon Bossert
Style: Blackened Death Metal
Pre-orders: https://smarturl.it/NecronomiconUNUS
]]>Back around November 2017 Paradise Lost were triumphantly parading their brand of Gothic Doom / Doom Death Metal one venue after another in celebration of the band’s “Medusa” album. And as the band touched down in the English capital, I had sat with longstanding guitarist Greg Mackintosh for a tete-a-tete.
Due to conspiring forces of evil and other less mystical factors over which the interviewer had no control, the interview could not see the light of day until now. This is ironic as the ambience seems to have become gloomier…..
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How has the Medusa tour been going until now?
Greg: Now is probably a good time to catch us on this tour because it’s about 5½ weeks into it so it’s not too long into the tour and not too little either. All the dates have been very positive. The venues have been packed. So I can’t complain really. There have been a few illnesses on the tour bus, which happens every time, and everyone keeps spreading it.
The most susceptible to illnesses tend to be the band’s singer…..
Greg: In fact Nick [Holmes – Paradise Lost vocalist] has that. This morning he was worried that he might have to have some steroid injection in the neck…but he seems to be not too bad now.
Early in the tour I believe you played in the United Arab Emirates. I’m curious…how did that gig go?
Greg: Yeah, it was a weird one. Anathema had played there before so we asked them how it was and they said it was fine. It was a bit strange at the airport because we were singled out. Personally I had all my stuff taken apart and I’ve never had that in 20 years. But apart from that… the promoters, the people, the venue, the crowd…it was all great really. That was an interesting one, for sure.
Let’s talk about the recently released “Medusa” album, for which the ‘back to the roots’ epithet strikes me as appropriate. How much of the album was intuitive and how much of it was organic?
Greg: It materialised from the last song we had written for the previous album [“The Plague Within” of 2015], which is a song called ‘Beneath Broken Earth’. That song was a last-minute thing for that album. I had said: “I really want to do a Doom Metal song for the album.” So we wrote it and it turned out to be one of our favourite songs to play live. We had even done a video for it.
The whole “Medusa” album kind of came off the back of that song. We thought “Why don’t we do a full album in the vein of ‘Beneath Broken Earth’?” So it was all pretty intuitive. We just really wanted to go with it and it snowballed on, track after track. Even with the artwork, we followed the whole thing through in a similar vein.
I’d like to talk about some specific songs from “Medusa”…songs that struck me for some reason or another. ‘Until The Grave’ is perhaps one of the album’s most sonically abrasive songs. What feelings were you trying to evocate with that song?
Greg: Well, with a lot of the album we were trying to get across a wintery feeling…an autumnal and wintery feeling. So there’s a lot of Doom Metal on there. You say it was one of the most abrasive songs…actually I think it’s one of the most catchy ones. When you hit the chorus it’s quite a catchy chorus really. Some of the others…such as the opening song ‘Fearless Sky’ and the title-track ‘Medusa’…I think they’re very very Doomy, downbeat and miserable songs. ‘Until The Grave’ has a few lighter elements wrought into it to some degree. You know, you could see the album as one bereft of all hope, very very miserable, very nihilistic but I think that at some point there’s a little bit of hope in there. And it’s got to be like that. Otherwise, the musical darkness wouldn’t sound so dark.
I see what you’re saying…you need to compare negativity with something positive for it to feel negative. There is no dark without light.
Greg: Yes. I know it sounds odd but I think it’s definitely something you have to have. It’s the same with the dynamics of songs…for something to be heavy, you have to contrast it with something else. Otherwise it would feel all the same.
You’re mentioning heavy songs….one of them is probably ‘No Passage For The Dead’ which has that huge riff that dominates the composition. Did you have any trouble finding the appropriate guitar tone for that one?
Greg: The guitar tones of the album was something we had discussed within the band. Before we went into the studio, I was toying about with different pedals and things. I wanted to use two different guitar sounds and blend them together. And that’s exactly what we did. Basically we got a very old-school Doom guitar sound, which is an old Boss Superfuzz [guitar pedal] into a Sunn amp. The other was just a 5150 with a tubescreen in front. So we mixed those two sounds together to get this kind of fuzzy, messy guitar sound but that has some definition to it because sometimes with the real fuzzed out Doom sound you can’t tell what’s going on and we wanted to have the best of both worlds. It took a bit of messing about but I had spent more time actually searching for the guitar sound than recording it. It took me 2 ½ days to record all my guitar parts for the album and, before that, slightly longer to find the sound I wanted.
My next question might already have been unwittingly answered when you were discussing the matter of contrasts but I’ll ask the question anyway. Songs such as ‘Blood and Chaos’ could musically fit into a wide range of Paradise Lost albums. Don’t you think this weakens the identity of “Medusa”?
Greg: Contrasts…that’s exactly what it is. At first I had really wanted to do a full-on downbeat record with no light and then when we recorded it and were discussing the track listing and the track order, it just made sense to put in something like ‘Blood and Chaos’ in there because it gave you contrast that you needed to balance the album out.
I’ve noticed that Paradise Lost has quite a few songs about language and communication. I’m here thinking about songs such as ‘Weeping Words’, ‘Beneath Black Sky’, ‘Just Say Words’ and others. Do you think communication breakdown in mankind accounts for most of the world’s ills?
Greg: I think communication is key to a lot of things. From single relationships to the international relationships of countries. Many different factors fuel conflict…money, religion, power struggles….but ultimately the crux of all those elements is communication. If you don’t communicate, you’re never going to get anywhere.
Let’s speak about the band’s line-up. Finnish drummer Waltteri Väyrynen (Abhorrence, Tyr, The Wargasm) joined both Paradise Lost and your other band Vallenfyre after Adrian Erlandsson had left both bands. How did you get to know Waltteri?
Greg: It was through an online audition I had done for Vallenfyre. Initially Adrian had to bow out of doing live shows with Vallenfyre and was still with Paradise Lost since back then he was starting to get too busy with At The Gates. So, as I was saying, we did this audition through Facebook – potential candidates had to learn 2 Vallenfyre songs and film themselves playing the drums to those songs. And it’s amazing how many drummers didn’t even manage to do that properly. For example some guys would record the wrong songs or send their own songs. That’s not what they were asked so that immediately got rid of about 80% of candidates.
Waltteri was one of those who did some specific things and I really liked his drumming style. I liked his attitude too, which was something I got familiar with via our correspondence. Then when we got him to England to rehearse with Vallenfyre, we knew straight away that he was just the right guy. Humour is very important as well and the Finnish sense of humour is very similar to the northern English sense of humour, which is a very self-deprecating, dry and caustic humour.
Then, when the same thing happened to Adrian with Paradise Lost I immediately suggested Waltteri. And my mates in Paradise Lost knew that I wouldn’t have put him in Vallenfyre if he wasn’t able to get along with people. So it has all worked out very well. He gets along great with the guys…for a successful band relationship, I’d say 50% of it is the ability as a player and 50% of it is getting along with people.
Considering the fact that Waltteri lives in Finland, how does the band manage to sound like a solid, compact unit?
Greg: To be honest a lot of it is done online these days. Even when Adrian was still with the band, he was living in London and I was living in the north of England and all the songwriting for the previous record was done online, such as through e-mails or specific software. So we just continued with that same system with Waltteri. I mean even if he lived just 15 miles away, I’d probably still do it the same way.
[In the early 1990s Paradise Lost emerged as pioneers of the Doom Death genre but after a handful of albums, the band’s music embraced the electronic sonorities of Gothic Rock. Along this path, Paradise Lost recorded several other albums.]
Without the hugely successful “One Second” album of 1997, do you think Paradise Lost would have done albums such as “Faith Divides Us” (2009) or “Believe In Nothing” (2001)?
Greg: I think every album led very honestly onto the next one. So without any one of them it probably wouldn’t have been exactly the same. There’s also the “Host” album which you didn’t mention. You know, people thought it was an organised change [of sound]…nothing really was an organised change. The biggest change in our music came between “Draconian Times” and “One Second” and that was purely because we had worked so hard doing “Draconian Times” and “Icon” back-to-back that we didn’t have any time off for 4 years and we simply got absolutely bored of playing that kind of stuff. It was like working in a factory, doing the same stuff over and over again without pause. We just wanted something different – and that was the whole reason behind the music change.
Is that the same reason why you recorded the album that is “Medusa”…that you got bored of playing electronic-sounding Gothic Rock?
Greg: Kind of. I mean we couldn’t be passionate if we kept doing the same kind of stuff now, doing the same music we’ve been doing for these last 15 years. Now we’ve got passion for this kind of thing again.
Greg Mackintosh, do you think you’re a nihilistic person?
Greg: Unfortunately, in a way, yeah. I don’t tend to like people so much [laughs]. I think we live in a population of dicks. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to destroy anybody, but I just tend to keep myself to myself.
If that attitude means you keep creating music then we’re all happy!
Greg: That’s the right way to get the angst out. If more terrorists made songs instead of hurting people, the world would be a better place.
[The interview over, we shook hands and Greg expressed interest in The Power Of Metal Webzine…]
Greg: So the webzine is Danish?
Well it started out in Denmark but it’s in English and its writers are spread around the world.
Greg: I see…because we played in Denmark before we came to London.
In fact our editor, Thomas Nielsen, was there to see you play in Aarhus (Denmark) and he even reviewed that gig.
Greg: I must remember to check that out. I hope he gave us a good review.
I honestly don’t remember but he probably did because he’s a big Paradise Lost fan.
Greg: Ah, that’s all right then.
“Medusa” is available through Nuclear Blast or leading retailers. Do check it out!
Interview and live photography: Chris Galea (© 2018)
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- Line-up:
Paradise Lost online:
Homepage: http://paradiselost.co.uk/
Reverbnation: www.reverbnation.com/paradiselostband
FaceBook: www.facebook.com/paradiselostofficial
YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/paradiselostuk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OfficialPL
]]>
On March 16th, cult metallers PARADISE LOST will release a remastered version of their legendary seventh studio album, »Host«, and a first-ever pressing of the songs on vinyl.
As a first taste, the Brits have now unveiled a lyric video to their single ‘So Much Is Lost (Remastered)’, which once was the first track to be released off their 1999’s »Host«. This album saw PARADISE LOST moving further away from their previous death metal roots to a melancholic electropop sound.
Watch the lyric video here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeeID9ag-zY
Jaime Gomez Arellano, who remastered the album, states: ”
»Host« is a fantastic album with a stellar production. When I had the opportunity to remaster it, I focused on warming it up through analogue tape and giving it more of that analogue ‘vibe’ since a lot of records from that period were a bit thin sounding in comparison to today‘s standards. The remaster resulted in more depth and bass frequencies and generally a warmer and fuller sound. I hope the fans enjoy it!”
PARADISE LOST singer Nick Holmes adds:
“It was interesting to revisit this stage of the band’s history. It’s certainly not metal thrashing mad, but I’ve always regarded some of our strongest material was written around this period, and I still regard ‘So Much Is Lost’ as a really strong song.”
The album will be available as digipack and in three different vinyl colours (black, clear and mint) for the first time ever. Pre-order starts today, you can get your copy here: nblast.de/ParadiseLostHostNB
Pre-order digitally and receive ‘So Much Is Lost’ instantly at: smarturl.it/SoMuchIsLostsmarturl.it/HostRemastered
The band’s latest doom metal monster »Medusa« is now in stores and has been voted ‘best release of 2017’ by several magazines such as Decibel or Rock Hard Italy: nblast.de/ParadiseLostMedusaNB
You can catch the band live on their current UK headline tour or at the following festivals:
16.02. UK Portsmouth – Wedgewood Rooms
17.02. UK Bristol – Thekla
18.02. UK Nottingham – Rescue Rooms
20.02. UK Belfast – Limelight 2
21.02. IRL Dublin – Tivoli
22.02. UK Glasgow – Classic Grand
23.02. UK Manchester – Gorilla
]]>Sinistro from Portugal were unknown to me until a week ago when I checked them out on Spotify. What I heard was surprising, and surprisingly beautiful. Patricia Andrade’s vocal is truly amazing, and the studio recordings are mesmerising, offering a sludgy soundscape with Andrade’s voice in a very dominant position (and rightfully so).
Seeing the band is a no less special experience, however with a slightly different twist. First of all, due to the live mix, Andrade is much less dominant, and that, I’m afraid, is not a good thing. Her voice being the driver of Sinistro’s sound, that is simply something that cannot be lost.
Secondly, with her onstage antics (read: spasmodic moves), pale skin and very red lipstick, the singer adds an element of cabaret to the show, which is not necessarily a bad thing, although it is a stark contrast to the rest of the band who appear like a bunch of shy shoegazers.
But the thing is, after three songs or so, Sinistro become a dull live experience. When the music rather than the vocal dominates (unlike the studio recording), there’s simply not enough going on to keep a man interested and eventually it feels a bit like being hit by a tranquilizer dart.
Highly recommended Spotify listening, though!
The Edith Piaf of doom: Patricia Andrade
Pallbearer, whom I read many praises of in the German music press, are supposedly the hot shit. Compared to Sinistro, they do fare better with a from the outset much more varied approach to the doom/sludge genre and a lot more interaction with the audience. ‘That guy is kind of proggy’, my mate Michael notes about singer/guitarist Brett Campbell, and, yeah, he does have a point. I have to distract from the fact that he reminds me a lot of a guy who works in the Finance department where I work, but let’s forget about that.
Again, I had to use Spotify to check out what this was before the concert, and to me, the Arkansas four-piece’s music actually had a lot of Paradise Lost in it. This, however, is not so obvious to me tonight. This sounds like sludgy doom with elements of prog, and it ain’t half bad, although I eventually fall into the same lethargy as I’ve done so often with other bands of the genre.
Sympathetic bunch, though.
Doom sludge with a touch of prog – Pallbearer from Little Rock
When Lost Paradise came out in 1990, I was in awe; it was different, it has heavy, it was dark in every possible way. I can in all honesty say that up until 1999, each and every album Paradise Lost made was in some way groundbreaking and defining, and certainly enjoyed heavy rotation on my record player or in the CD player. They were and are one of my all-time favourite bands, plain and simple.
The first time I saw Paradise Lost live was in 1994 and I’ve seen them a number of times since, and have always enjoyed Nick Holmes’ dry, English humour along with the amazing songs this band has created over the years. However, tonight’s performance, I fear, is not one I can call their strongest ever. Now you are warned.
Nick and the boys kick off with “Gods of Ancient” from the latest opus brutalis, Medusa. In the photo pit, the sound isn’t at all the best, and this song isn’t exactly one that captures the audience with melodic hooks or catchy choruses like so many Paradise Lost songs, but you could say it’s a statement that PL mean doomy business.
With “Remembrance” from Icon, there is more catchiness to be had, but it’s as if the energy level is slightly under par with Halifax’s proud sons, and the Aarhus is disappointingly easily lead into lacklustre responsiveness on this Saturday night.
Sadly, this defines the concert, even through classic or near-classic material like “One Second”, “Tragic Idol”, “Shadowkings”and “Faith Divides Us”. With “Eternal” (see clip below), one of my favourite tunes ever, it’s as if Paradise Lost finally find the nerve and basically themselves. This continues into the earth shattering “Beneath Broken Earth’, one of the the master pieces from 2015’s The Plague Within. With “Ember’s Fire”, another true classic is aired, and it is around this time that the audience at long last figure out who they have in front of them. Ironically, this is the last song of the set proper.
It is a relief to hear how adamant the demand for encores is, and as Paradise Lost launch into the mighty ‘No Hope in Sight”, they are celebrated feverishly.
Instead of doing the obvious (playing “As I Die”), they then play the slow doom tune “The Longest Winter”, a lesser know new piece from Medusa, and one could argue that this was a bad choice. But, hey, this is Paradise Lost. Much to everyone’s relief, the final encore is “The Last Time”, another grande classic, and exactly one of those songs you’d like to say farewell and see you the next with.
In the end, an approved gig, but it wasn’t a seal of approval that came easily, and it was only carried over the finishing line with a strong repertoire of doom.
Probably the most laid back bassist in all of metaldom…
…and his sidekick, the happiest doom guitarist in the world
]]>On Medusa they continue to move through the musical line of The Plague Within, and some songs even remind me of their Gothic period. This is their most dark and brutal album in a long time. The music most of the time is very slow, and Nick Holmes combines his growling style with his cleaner parts in a very natural way. After the first two doomy tracks, my personal favorite, ‘From the Gallows’, follows. It is a song with a bit more tempo, and could have been on the Gothic album. After that Paradise Lost returns with one of the slowest and darkest tracks, followed by the title track, with excellent guitar parts and some fine keyboards. The darkness and sadness carries on with ‘No Passage For the Dead’. With these slow and dark tracks the band creates almost the same atmosphere as with their debut album. Just before the music puts me in a desperate and depressive mood, the music speeds up again with the mid-tempo track ‘Blood and Chaos’, a song with a contagious groove. Medusa ends how it started, with a perfect mix of death, doom, and melancholy melodies.
With Medusa, Paradise Lost has created their heaviest album in a long time, and I think fans of their early years will surely appreciate this.
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