Paradise Lost – One Second

By 1997 Paradise Lost had already shown that they were not really into stylistic stagnation by slowly but surely moving from their death-doom origins into a more elaborate (even melodic!) strain of metal when 1995’s “Draconian Times” was, to some extent, regarded as the European answer to Metallica’s “Black Album” and reached a fair commercial success (for the genre and epoch standards, anyway).

Therefore, the guys REALLY showed to have guts and a clear artistic drive and freewill by going through yet another (and sharper) stylistic shift and releasing something like “One Second”.

An unlikely fusion of goth metal and electronica, “One Second” is often hailed as a “Depeche Mode gone metal” album, but I think there’s more to it and the goth, sombre feeling that the band was known for was still there in spades managing to create a fistful of unmissable songs that defined a new approach to the goth genre, like the opener “One Second”, “Mercy” or “Another Day”, inspiring many bands that had already been formed on the wake of the rise of the so called “Peaceville Three” (Paradise Lost, Anathema and My Dying Bride”) to move towards this more sleek, yet still dark, sound.

This doesn’t mean that the album is only an experimental melee, and you have a share of straight rockers like “Soul Courageous”, “Say Just Words” (a proper hit single that remains one of my favourite songs from the band’s whole catalogue) or “Blood Of Another”.

As history would show later, “One Second” was not a one-off extravaganza of sorts by a band wanting to stir some controversy or gain commercial success, as they would dive even further into this type of sound with 1999’s “Host”, an album that would cause even further division among the fans.
Besides, and even if the band is back nowadays into a more purely metal sound, masterminds Nick Holmes and Greg Mackintosh currently pour their more alternative influences in their project Host, which keeps this branch of the Paradise Lost soundtree alive and well almost 30 years later.

Anniversary edition and they do not included bonus track from digipack ''I Despair''. Pathetic.
And I'm not asking for all the b sides...
BS move