I love checking out new music. On most Fridays, there’s at least one or two releases that I like to check out, add to my music library, and then listen to over the weekend and into the next week. Each week that there are releases that piqued my interest, I’ll share a little bit about them here.
Paradise Lost – Gothic (35th Anniversary)
I will be honest. Paradise Lost’s first three albums have kind of always eluded me. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with them, but because I just never really listened to them that much. It really was their 1993 album Icon where they started clicking with me. And so Gothic is one of those I never really checked out.
But I love Paradise Lost. And a 35th anniversary remaster seems like a pretty good reason and a pretty good excuse to get into the band. So I’m excited to use this new release as a good reason/excuse to do just that.
Periphery – A Pale White Dot
Where do I start with Periphery? Way back in the day, probably around 2011 or 2012, I fell hard for the subgenre of metal known as djent. Now, while there are a lot of people who, in the ensuing years, have argued about the merits of djent music, I do think that there are a few bands that were in that category that were still standouts. I love TesseracT. I love vildhjarta. And I want to love Periphery.
My only problem with Periphery is when Spencer Sotelo goes into his cleans, it just kind of doesn’t work for me. And a lot of times, the music that surrounds those moments of clean vocals has a cheesiness, maybe even a poppiness to it, that I don’t love. I bounce off of it.
The end result of that is that every Periphery album is about 60% something I’m really into, but when that 40% that I don’t love kicks in, I lose interest. So it’s rare that I listen to a full Periphery album start to finish. But I still like them enough that I always check them out, and I look forward to seeing how this newest album fares.