Back in the early 90s I bought Pearl Jam’s ‘Vs’ on CD. It was a great album that I’ve listened to regularly ever since.

I know subscriptions for all of our cultural artefacts are the in thing in the mid 2020s, but have we stopped to think about what that is going to mean as we reach old age?

Nothing to show for it

On the surface, £10 or $10 per month seems harmless enough, especially when access to the vast majority of the world’s music is (theoretically) available to you.

However, over the course of 40 years, that’s going to set you back nearly five grand in today’s money. Fine, that’s not so bad, until you realise the music stops as soon as the money stops.

Let’s add in the ten bucks a month for the movies you no longer own. Yes, these are a little more complicated because when I first started buying CDs we were also buying movies on VHS. Things have moved on a bit since, but DVDs still work fine if you don’t care about the resolution.

So, we’re up to twenty bucks a month in today’s money. We’re just shy of ten grand now, still with nothing to show for it.

Oh, but not everything is on one service. You’ll want Netflix, Disney, maybe Amazon Prime as well to cover most of the bases. Disney’s six bucks, Prime is nine bucks, so that’s fifteen bucks per month. What are we up to now?

Ten, ten, six, nine...wait, that’s thirty five bucks a month, every month for perhaps forty years. We’re not far off seventeen grand now. The scary part is, if that money had gone into a savings account at a reasonable 4% per month, you would be looking at £41,507.

A friend of mine bought the same CD around the same time as I did. He still has his. It still works great.

I however, traded all of mine in back in 2018 when I discovered minimalism, but that’s a story for another day.

It turns out, music and movies were what I valued, so now I can focus on getting rid of everything else. See, Minimalism™.

Paying for time

On the surface, the idea of a subscription isn’t too unreasonable. For the people who voraciously consume as much new music as they can, there’s a lot of value to be had in a subscription.

However, I know that I tend to listen to the same three to five albums heavily per year, along with the old favourites --Paradise Lost and Pearl Jam’s back catalogue mainly. The economics of a subscription start to make less and less sense for my consumption habits.

When it comes to movies and TV, the numbers don’t add up at all. Twenty five bucks a month for maybe one or two good series, maybe one or two good movies? What we are paying for is the hope of continuing to access them, only to find they’ve been removed from the service when we go looking for them.

What often gets missed in these cost discussions is, all being well, most of us are going to be around for a really long time. If I buy that CD in 1993, but I’m still using it in 2050 or beyond, let’s say 60 years, that £41,507 inches closer to £105,132 thanks to the power of compounding.

We’re over £100,000 now, over a lifetime of music and movies. Still with absolutely nothing to show for it.

An exercise

I want you to humour me for a minute. I want you to think about ten albums that have left an impression on you. Ten CDs (or vinyl if you prefer) that you would carry with you for the rest of your days.

Then have a look on eBay or any of the used marketplaces in your area and see how much it would cost to build that collection.

Chances are it’ll be less than a single year of your chosen music subscription, but it will be yours forever.

When you reach your pensionable age, you could use the money you saved to buy...well, anything you like, you’ve got £100,000.

Closing thoughts

I started writing this as exercise for myself. I had the idea in my head, but I never really sat down and looked at the numbers in any great detail.

Truth be told, they kinda scared the crap out of me. I had somewhat casually started racking up subscriptions for various things, not really taking the long view about it.

I would have a purge every now and again, but they would slowly creep up over time. To think that £35 per month compounds to over £100,000 in a lifetime is more than a little alarming to me.

I feel another purge coming on...

I’m on Mastodon

I first started tinkering with linux back when Ubuntu 6.04 was released. April 2006 was my first hint that things were not so good in Windows land, so I started looking for the exits.

Unfortunately, as someone who has always bought Nvidia cards, those cards were stacked against me and I never managed to make Ubuntu stick. Thankfully, it is now 2026 and my word things have changed.

Kubuntu 26.04 LTS

I’ve spent the past two decades dipping my toes in now and again to see how things were progressing. I’ve been fairly loyal to Ubuntu over this time because if there were bugs, they (presumably) had the resources to deal with them.

However, my weak spot has always been gaming. Ever since Doom 2 and the original Quake opened my eyes to what these formerly beige boxes could do, I’ve never been too far from a PC. Unfortunately, this was always a challenge for anyone looking to switch to Linux.

Not anymore. Valve, continuing to dangle the prospect of Half Life 3 over our heads, has been working on squaring the Linux gaming circle since Windows 8 came along and soiled the sheets. Now pretty much everything in my Steam library works fine on Linux.

At the beginning of the year I decided there was no going back to Windows, so I put in the request to delete my entire Microsoft account for good. I still have to deal with it at work, but my personal life is resolutely Windows-free now.

Anyway, onto Kubuntu 26.04.

Up until this week I’ve been daily driving Kubuntu 25.10 and thoroughly enjoying what KDE has become. It is a beautiful desktop environment, which is backed up by a suite of equally great applications.

I normally like to do my drafting in iA Writer on the Mac, but there is no Linux version of that (yet), but there is Ghostwriter, a feature-rich yet refreshingly minimalist Markdown editor that you can obtain for free from the Discover store.

I’ve also been using QBZ, a Qobuz client that I mentioned previously. There are of course native Plex, Signal and Proton Mail apps, along with Vivaldi as my browser of choice.

Backing all this up, a few years ago I bought a Qnap NAS and around 16TB of storage to go into it. I use Qsync to sync my documents, music and photos to my laptop –currently a Macbook, but I’m testing the waters to see if I can replace that with something I can put Kubuntu on.

To move things between my iPhone and my desktop, there is the excellent KDE Connect app, which lets you share files between iOS and Kubuntu if you don’t have a NAS in between.

The only thing left to figure out is what to do with my 20 years of RAW images from my camera. I’ve been flip-flopping between Darktable (which is needlessly fiddly) or Rawtherapee, which is closer to what I’m used to with Capture One.

I’ve not found a good alternative to iCloud Photos yet. I had hoped Ente would be it, but its editing features continue to be disappointing at a time when they seem to be aggressively pushing AI features I don’t want. I just want to be able to re-orientate a photo without creating a duplicate of it. Is that so much to ask?

It is also another subscription, which I’m trying to get away from. I don’t see much point in paying to access my own files.

Thoughts…

I think desktop linux has reached the stage where I can feel entirely confident in recommending it to people who just want a reprieve from Microsoft’s increasingly anti-user practices. It’s as good on high-end hardware as it is at keeping older hardware out of the landfill.

It is also completely free for anyone to use. Just install it on a USB stick, mash F8 when you start your machine, select your USB stick and just play around with the desktop until you are ready to install it.

As long as you don’t want to play multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat, most if not all games will work fine, in some cases better than they do on Windows thanks to the lack of telemetry and bloat.

The best part is, if you want to start from as bare a desktop as you like, they give you the option. You’re lucky if Microsoft will let you choose your web browser, but you will never be able to uninstall Edge. It is their computer, not yours.

The past two versions of Kubuntu have given me that giddy feeling I had back in the 90s, when the PC and even the internet were still new and exciting to me. KDE offers so much scope for customisation, but it is beautiful out of the box; it has a wealth of open source applications to choose from and perhaps most importantly, I feel like I own my computer again.

I’m on Mastodon

Just a quick post to share a couple of recent small-web discoveries you may be interested in.

The first one is another blogroll --https://blogroll.org

This one is apparently sponsored by the good folks behind Micro.blog, where the Reed & Pickup is hosted. It looks very slick and I should see if I can get the R&P listed on there at some point.

Music

In a world where many of us are using different sources for our music, whether that be Apple Music, Qobuz or Bandcamp, sharing links to your latest discovery is needlessly complicated.

Thankfully there’s a developer on the fediverse who came up with a neat solution: https://musiccloud.io

You either search for the track, or paste the URL from your chosen streaming service and it’ll give you handy page of links, bio and more to share with your friends. Like this one:

A song you should definitely listen to, by the way...

Lastly, I want to bring your attention to a wonderfully old-school website and hub for the small web that I landed on during a Kagi Small Web browsing session.

https://gusbus.space/blog/

The small web has me feeling excited about the internet again. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that already, but just in case...

In an attempt to address the harms caused by algorithmic social media platforms like Facebook, governments around the world are scrambling to put barriers up to stop youngsters from being led astray, instead of, you know, regulating the companies peddling these harms.

What seems laudable on the surface, the idea behind age gating certain parts of the internet is flawed for a number of reasons, mainly the one where you hand over your precious data to a barely-regulated third party and hope they don’t leave it on the bus. However, today I’m not going to talk about that.

I told you I was going to stay positive and gosh darn-it I am sticking to that. Anyway, I’ve found an upside.

Where there are no walls

These big platforms, with all their billions are going to have to stop people from coming in if they have no ID. This is actually great news. I would have preferred it if they were regulated out of existence, but do you know where they are not going to be asking for you to potentially doxx yourself?

That’s right, the open internet.

I know I’ve been banging on about this for a little while now, but these modern yet slightly old-fashioned websites we old farts grew up building and using often collect no data whatsoever. This site doesn’t even have analytics, as life is too short to worry about how many clicks I am getting.

You can view this website without ID. But better yet, you can create your own website without ID too. Shh, don’t say that too loudly.

If you have a youngster in the house, or just someone who wants to practice their writing skills and exercise their creativity on the internet, get them blogging. Teach them some basic HTML and get them creating a static site on Neocities, or get them writing on Bear, Micro.blog or Pika.

They can be as anonymous as they want to be, they can talk about anything they want to. They can link to their friends blogs and start one of those wonderful web rings.

Best of all, there won’t be an app on their phone following them around trying to sell them insecurity and self-loathing.

Aging Out

As I’ve said before, I love the internet. However, I am acutely aware that I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to see the younger generations take the reins and start building the internet in their own image.

As an aside, I would also like to see more normies writing on the internet, as I think we are in danger of skewing too far towards other nerds.

For we old farts, we have every reason to be suspicious of the companies doing the age verification and every reason to never deal with them.

Let us go back to building out the open internet we knew and loved back in the 90s and early 2000s, with as much quirkiness and personality as we can muster.

Personally I’m giving some serious thought to getting some hosting sorted out, just to see what today’s static website tools can do. I’ll keep this site, obviously, but my curious mind wants to know.

I’m on Mastodon

Whilst I was browsing the Kagi Small Web, which has become a bit of an escape of late, I came across a blog post which got me thinking.

It talked about sending emails to each other, out of the blue, like we did in the old days.

Where did we go wrong?

The post sums the current state of affairs pretty well.

If I open my email inbox right now, I see two things. The first is my abject failure to achieve inbox zero, writ in 72-point bold-face Impact. And the second is a massive pile of newsletters, purchase receipts, tracking information, and marketing emails. [Evie Fae] (https://ev-fae.quest/send-email-out-of-the-blue/)

I briefly talked about my first trans-Atlantic email exchange in a previous post, but like the old internet I never really stopped to think about how the use of email shifted from a joy to an inconvenience.

The old internet was a mostly open affair. You didn’t need to login for very much, save perhaps a chatroom or messaging client like ICQ or Yahoo!. Once your modem had completed the squawky two-step with your ISP, the world was your oyster.

It would be remiss of me to not mention the classic Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan movie from this formative era, You’ve Got Mail. It was this time when relationships were being formed over potentially vast distances. The world was suddenly getting smaller.

Now, the cookie infestation didn’t really begin until the mid to late 90s, so whilst we may have had an email address, it was mostly used for communication between ourselves.

Over time they gradually became our identities, our way to login to websites and a way for those websites to carpet-bomb our inboxes with marketing and spam.

There were of course other reasons to move away from email for communication –it is inherently insecure, unless you use an encrypted service like Proton (referral) or Tuta or manage to figure out how to configure your existing provider or client to handle the encryption key. There are messaging apps like Signal or Threema which offer the means to message people privately and with little fuss.

The thing is though, email is universal. Chat apps are invariably a walled garden which only let you chat with other users on that platform. It doesn’t matter who your email provider is, it can receive email from any other email provider.

Is it too late to reclaim email for the joy of communication? Or is doomed to be the place for spam, website logins and work tasks with impossibly short deadlines? I don’t think so.

Just like bank accounts, you don’t need to live with just one email address. I have a number of different accounts on the go, each with a different purpose.

I use the hide-my-email feature built into my password manager for the mailing lists and the logins for websites I don’t completely trust –usually those band merch websites. If any one of them misbehaves I can cut them off in a heartbeat.

I have email addresses for the more important logins; addresses for the really important stuff, plus a few spare addresses for different eventualities.

Of course, I have one that I can give out to chums if they ask for it. I’m holding out hope that one day we’ll fall back in love with email once again, one day when we break down the walls big tech has built around us.

I’m on Mastodon

I’m a little ashamed to admit I’ve thoroughly slept on The Pineapple Thief. I’m a sucker for music which sits at the proggy end of the spectrum, but I also think Gavin Harrison is one of the greatest drummers on the scene right now.

Harrison joined The Pineapple Thief in 2017, so I should have been all over them. I’m not sure what happened, but I’m here now.

PT

It seems like a strange coincidence that The Pineapple Thief shares its initials with Harrison’s other band, Porcupine Tree. However, the similarities don’t stop there. Bruce Soord’s vocal delivery is very, very Steven Wilson. Musically it isn’t a world away either.

If you enjoyed In Absentia or Deadwing in particular, I think you will enjoy what The Pineapple Thief are offering here.

Throughout you’ll find a pleasant mix of choruses you can sing along to, with the rhythmic chops you’ll have come to expect from anything featuring such an impressive drummer.

I’ve seen people compare TPE to Radiohead, but I don’t quite agree with that. I can appreciate that Radiohead has its fans, but they largely passed me by when they were at their peak.

They are a band I should probably go back to with these middle-aged ears, but they have always come across as oppressively maudlin and claustrophobic. It Leads to This is comparatively airy and light, with Harrison’s chops buying time for the rest of the band to breathe.

There are many sections spread across the album where the drums are almost the centre of attention –not in the dreaded drum solo sense, but as a pulse to carry the light instrumentation and long notes.

The drums often get buried in the mix with rock and metal, but I can place every cymbal and tom that Harrison lays a stick to here. It is actually a wonderful headphone experience.

A sit-back listening experience

It Leads to This is almost entirely free of rough edges. I’m not going to say it is background music, but it is the sort of album that doesn’t leave you reaching for the skip button when that one song comes along. It is the sort of record you can just put on, sit down and blow through without being overly challenged or irritated.

It also comes in at around 40 minutes from start to finish and doesn’t outstay its welcome. I love my technical death metal as much as the next guy, but sometimes you need something calming and easier on the ears.

I’ve listened to it straight through three times and then started on Nothing But the Truth from 2021. I think they’re going to keep me busy for a little while.

I’m on Mastodon

It is far too easy to contribute to the noise and the anger in the world. It certainly pleases the algorithms, but it doesn’t please me. I suspect you’re not much of a fan of it, either.

I’ve been thinking about how I want to approach this blog from now on and, I’m going to focus on writing about the things that I find fascinating, or exciting.

By doing this I hope it’ll force me to look for the joy in this world, no matter how hard it may be to find. We have to build the world we want to live in and that means moving towards the things that light us up.

The exciting stuff

This week I have enjoyed reading about how France is giving Microsoft the boot. I’ve also been enjoying a 3rd party Qobuz client for Linux, called QBZ. It is in some ways better than the native Qobuz app on the platforms it does support.

I’ve also been enjoying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game I just didn’t understand what all the fuss was about when it arrived on the original Switch. It turns out the mistake I was making was in trying to finish it. I put around 40 hours into it back then, but it never clicked for me.

It is a game that just wants you to explore. To look under rocks, to talk to people and just soak in the world they have built.

That’s probably a lesson for life too. When you get to middle age it is easy to start becoming cynical, to stop wondering and stop being inquisitive.

Rediscovering the small web has reawakened some of that curiosity. I need to hold on to that.

I’m on Mastodon

Before big tech commandeered the internet from the people and pushed us to the margins, we had our own social network of sorts.

Not an algorithm, or a predatory data sponge to follow us around, but a simple hyperlink to another human’s homepage.

Rebuilding

This morning I had a feeling. A feeling of excitement as the building blocks of a new World Wide Web was forming. This isn’t another proprietary platform owned by yet another sociopath from the valley, but the old standards we used to rely on creaking slowly back to life.

The simple act of linking to another person’s personal blog or website was the foundation of the old web. It was a sign that you found enjoyment in that person’s efforts. Sometimes they would reciprocate and a web-ring would start to form.

Add a few more pages into the mix and you could theoretically spend hours reading what other humans had put their soul into.

Over on Mastodon, I discovered a guy named David had started a human-made web-ring, which you can find here: Human-Made

If you look up, you’ll find a Blogroll page has been added. These are a few of the blogs I’ve been following in an RSS reader. On that note, RSS is another foundational technology that big tech would like you to forget about.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a way for blogs to push out their content in a way that can be picked up by reader software. For us it is a way to follow a lot of blogs without needing to navigate to each one. You simply get a chronological feed in your reader. Meta and Google would rather keep you hooked on their algorithm instead.

My favourite RSS reader at the moment is (unfortunately) Mac and iOS only at the moment, but it is called Reeder. Reeder has the added benefit of giving you a way to also follow Youtube channels with none of the ads. It will also split any video or audio content in an RSS feed into a section of its own.

It costs around £10 per year, but it is more than worth it. These days I constantly seem to land on sites that want to share my browsing with thousands of ‘partners’. I know it is the way these sites make money, but do they need to be so invasive? Anyway, RSS readers skirt around all that.

Kagi Small Web

I’ve briefly mentioned this before, but the Kagi Small Web is proving to be an excellent resource. The search engine called Kagi has been compiling a very long list of smaller websites into the mother of all web-rings, organising them into categories and letting you browse through them at your leisure. There is also an app for iOS and Android, but you can check it out here: Kagi Small Web

It could just be that I’m in the the fediverse bubble, but I am getting a real kick out of the desire to wrestle back some control of the internet from the companies which have so far proved to be dreadful stewards of it.

The future is human-made, chronological and deliberate.

I’m on Mastodon

If you have been following along at home, lately I’ve been prattling on about the 90s internet for the past couple of posts, railing against the constant enshittification of the internet and the mind-boggling greed of some of the biggest companies in the world right now.

April Fools Day is one of those days where you can never quite trust what you see on the internet, which admittedly in 2026 takes some doing. However, Kagi, the premium search engine knocked everyone out of the water with this masterpiece.

I’ll have more to say on Kagi another time, but I just wanted to file this one for posterity. Seeing the Kagi homepage in the style of a mid-90s search engine was a joy to behold.

I’m on Mastodon

Whilst it is true that the internet is still out there, if you know how to find it, one thing I neglected to talk about was how it felt to be a teenager on the early internet.

Nostalgia continues to be a hell of a drug, but I don’t think it is right to ignore how much of an impression it left on me and my peers back then.

Different times

It is remarkable to think there was a time when most of us didn’t have an email address, or even a computer. Yes, some of my friends were lucky enough to have a Commodore Amiga or an Atari ST, which was mostly used for games but could be used for serious things too. PC’s were still hilariously expensive for 12-year-old me.

It was only the good fortune of a grandparent leaving money to me that enabled me to buy my first PC, a 486 DX2/66 with a whopping 4 Megabytes of RAM and a 170 Megabyte hard drive. The internet still wasn’t a feature at this stage, but we would share around floppy disks or CD-ROMs, or pick up a magazine with a disc selotaped to the cover.

It wasn’t until the mid-90s when we would be able to access the internet in the computer room in school. This ignited a spark.

Up until this point, information was something you would find in books…in the library, or from your teacher, or an Encarta CD-ROM(remember that?!).

Wait, you can just type something in to this search box and find something someone put on the internet? I can’t even…

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, the internet was mostly HTML pages we coded into one of a handful of editors doing the rounds at the time, along with low-resolution images and animated text. Even on a 56K modem pages would load pretty quickly and the plague of cookies and adtech was still a few years off.

We also had chat rooms, which at least to my eyes were civilised and fun. I understand they became quite sordid affairs a few years later when when the barriers to entry were much lower, but for us early-adopting nerds it was paradise.

Being able to reach someone on the other side of the world for the first time was incredible. I have family out in Canada which I hadn’t seen for about a decade by that point. I sent them a Christmas card and received an email back. An email, from halfway around the world!

Geocities

A big part of the online world back then was from sites like Geocities. This was a network of personal pages arranged in districts, affording people the freedom to code the websites of their dreams and have their own little corner of the web.

It would eventually be shuttered when its owner, Yahoo! began to circle the drain, with around 38 million pages disappearing with it. However, there is a project to turn those sites into a gallery, which you can find here.

Now

Skip forward a few decades and most of us spend our entire lives on the internet. We often have a number of email addresses, even fake ones we generate through a password manager to try to reduce the risk of our important ones falling into the wrong hands.

The internet today is awash with adtech, spyware and cookies from sites we haven’t even visited. We need multiple-megabit connections just to download things in a timely manner and a good proportion of what we see on the internet was put there by people with malicious intentions.

Some of the biggest companies on the planet are internet companies which make a living by making users dependent on it –the infinite scroll, the pull down to refresh, the engagement-farming, whilst producing nothing of value besides dopamine and the inevitable feeling of being used. It doesn’t matter, just so long as you look at the ads.

This didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual shift from brave new world to the all-encompassing void we see today. Slowly but surely the internet shifted from a passion project to an economic one, slowly enough that we didn’t stop to mourn its passing.

Perhaps the reason I have nostalgia for the early internet is because it exists in a different world to the one we are in now. To borrow a modern phrase for a moment, the vibes are very much off.

A new mission

The technology we had back then is still here. We still have the means to build simple websites –we apparently call them Static Websites now. Just HMTL, no database, no unnecessary bloat.

There are tools like Hugo for creating static sites, if you have a domain and a host to use it with, but you can also use services like Neocities or Nekoweb if you really want to go nuts, 90s style.

For now I’m happy just having somewhere to write, without messing around with layouts and colours, but I love looking at things people have made by themselves.

In the past twenty years we have gradually and unwittingly surrendered our creativity to an unthinking and unfeeling corporate machine.

A corporate machine which then stole what we had created, only to regurgitate it back to us, somehow worse than the original and with none of the soul.

Some call it AI, but we mostly call it slop.

Find me on Mastodon

Capital realised there were limits to how much useless junk it could sell to people.

But, what if they could get you to pay for things your brain would otherwise learn to do by itself?

What if they could get people to outsource cognitive functions like ’reading a document’ or ‘making some art’ to the point where they can’t do them anymore, but can pay $20 a month to replace what they’ve lost?

The whole world’s creativity on the hook to a US corporation for a monthly subscription. We’re already renting our culture, why not our brains too.

I really wish this was a joke.

Mastodon

I’ve referenced it in passing before, but I have a longing to rediscover the parts of the internet we’ve lost since it appeared to consolidate into a handful of massive sites.

Back in the 90s, before big business started taking an interest in this fertile new ground, the internet was a sea of small websites made (usually by hand) by people who really wanted to be there.

Small beginnings

The thing about the 90s was, we were limited by how quickly we could download data to our computers. I had a 56K modem back in the mid 90s, tiny by today’s standards but more than sufficient for basic HTML pages and low-res images. Unless you were minted, chances are you were connected using the only phone line into your home and you would get disconnected if someone else tried making a call. Simpler times.

The software to make websites back then was quite primitive. They were static HTML pages that looked ugly by today’s standards, but they were ours and we put our heart and soul into them.

Connecting them all together was a handful of search engines, such as Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo! They were mostly fine, Lycos being my go-to search engine, but Google would eventually come along and eat their lunch. However, by that point the profit motive was already starting to creep in.

The thing is, whilst the likes of Facebook and Youtube would come along towards the end of the 2000s and into the early 2010s and become the “only” parts of the internet people would see, the World Wide Web was still out there, it just wasn’t being seen by people unless it was a list of the best vacuum cleaners or coffee grinders.

This is why, if you search Google for anything, chances are you are only going to find pages of listicles or advertorials.

Advertisements Suck

The trouble with Google and search engines which also have an interest in selling their customers is, search results are often skewed towards pages that are good for Google and not for the person doing the searching.

This is why nearly every YouTube video is about a product, or it is trying to sell you on a lifestyle that will require a whole host of products.

Yes, if you look hard enough there are video essays about old products, or about subjects that go deeper than a swipe of your credit card, but they generally don’t do very well. Photography YouTubers who do product reviews gain a lot more traction than channels who talk about actually making photos.

This is why one of the original photography podcasts, which became a Youtube channel, called The Art of Photography now mostly does camera reviews.

There is another way…

How do we change this? Well, first up, you need to start blogging. I’m currently using Micro.blog. It costs around $5 per month, plus you might want a domain name, but it is not essential. There is also Bear Blog. Then just start writing about things that interest you.

But please, be yourself. Readers can spot AI slop from a mile away, so please don’t try to pass slop off as your own. Let your passion shine through, in your own voice.

Secondly, look for services where you can pay to make the ads go away. I have switched my video watching to Nebula, which costs around £30 per year and the revenue share for creators is apparently much better and they’re not at the mercy of an algorithm that only wants people to buy more crap they don’t really need.

In the UK we still have catch-up TV services like ITVx and Channel4, both offer the ability to remove the ads. ITVx (£5.99) and Channel4+ (£3.99) together are cheaper per month than Youtube Premium (£12.99).

There are also search engines like Kagi and Uruky which have a subscription attached, but will put what you are searching for at the top of the list not at the bottom beneath a dozen ads.

Kagi also has an app for iOS and Android called “Small Web”, which lets you browse through a list of small sites made by people like me…and hopefully you too.

You can also switch your social media to Mastodon, which is a network of instances scattered all around the world, some geographical, some built around hobbies or interests, but all with a shared timeline. It is ad-free, there’s no algorithm, and it is resolutely free from fascist billionaires. You may want to donate to your instance though, as hosting sadly isn’t free.

If you decide to give that a go, you’ll find me here.

I love the internet, I just don’t like how it feels right now. I’d like to think we can do something about that.

My Mastodon chum over at https://spacetimetech.wordpress.com is gathering some resources together to that end, so I’ll update this post when he’s published it. I just wanted to empty my head of things it had been chewing on lately.

Music is an intensely personal thing. Whilst the corporate world has tried to package it up into a shiny box to sell to the lowest bidder for decades, there is music being released every day that precious few will get to hear.

I’d like to briefly talk about the bands creating wonderful music that I feel are criminally under-appreciated. In no particular order, mind you…

The Chant

I’m sure I’ve talked about these guys before. I know I’ve mentioned Counting Hours at some stage. Anyway, Ilpo Paasela, the vocalist for Counting Hours has another band called The Chant.

Where Counting Hours is largely a death-doom affair, expertly mixing growls with cleans, The Chant is all cleans and arguably closer to the likes of Sisters of Mercy, or more recently HOST.

Their most recent single, Peace Underwater arrived during the pandemic and I was hopeful that more would follow, but things have gone a bit quiet since.

The best place to find them is on Bandcamp.

REMINA and Light Field Reverie

These are two project by Heike Langhans and Mike Lamb, which I like to call the Heikeverse. Both projects scratch a similar itch, but where REMINA is cosmic doom (doom with a hint of space travel), Light Field Reverie is more introspective and down to Earth.

Heike’s ethereal vocals coupled with a rich but occasionally oppressive soundscape makes for an absorbing ride. REMINA has two albums out now, Strata and The Silver Sea.

So far there is only one Light Field Reverie album out at the time of writing, called Another World, but there’s another one arriving in 2026. The first single, Ender, was released a few weeks ago.

Phendrana

This was a complete surprise when their new album, Cathexis arrived earlier in the year. Phendrana is a one-man-band project from Mexico-based Anuar Salum, in a similar vein to Saor and Sgàile.

It is atmospheric black metal, but with the confidence to put together an 18-minute masterpiece at the end of its four-track album.

I would kindly ask that you humour me this one time and have a listen to The Effigy & The Titan.

A single track with a number of different movements, rounding off a splendid album. Cathexis is a beautiful, confident and patient piece of work that you might expect from one of the prog titans, not a relatively unknown solo project. It’s an album of the year contender, no doubt.

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Having cured my Black Metal vocal issues with Saor, my grazing seems to have landed on the (apparently) divisive world of Blackgaze.

Blackgaze is the unlikely pairing of black metal with shoegaze. I say unlikely, but somehow it works. As you will come to learn, I’m a sucker for music that does things a little different.

Just like honey…monster

At the end of last year Deafheaven’s Lonely People With Power made it into many of my chums best-of lists, so it seemed rude not to give it a go.

Unfortunately I may have been a bit harsh on first listen, because I may have suggested it was like Snow Patrol, but with screaming.

Whilst it is true that Blackgaze shares its lighter moments with indie pop, it does let rip from time to time. However, whilst the genre warmed on me, Deafheaven is still not quite there for me, yet. I’m not closing the door on them, but they just need a little more time for my brain to catch on.

Thankfully, a friend shared a few tracks from MØL’s (then) upcoming album Dreamcrush with me and I was smitten. Waiting for the new album I went back to their earlier one, Diorama. It was wonderful.

As it turns out, Shoegaze had already been (albeit unknowingly) on my radar for some time. I have long loved the Sophia Coppola movie Lost in Translation and the shoegaze-infused soundtrack featuring the likes of Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. Which begs the question, what if Kevin just screamed more?

Unlike Dreamcrush, Diorama is largely sung in their native Danish, which has the added perk of making me seem more cultured than I actually am. It isn’t as heavy from a musical perspective as the latest Deafheaven album, but it sure is beautiful, melodic and rich. It also blends the customary black metal vocal stylings with clean singing, which is just delightful.

With Dreamcrush MØL switched to English lyrics, making it slightly easier for a monoglot such as myself to understand what is going on, but the keen ear for melody demonstrated by Diorama is all present and correct.

Deciding between the two albums is tricky, but I think the new one edges it slightly, being a more consistent offering. I am still to work my way through the whole back catalogue, but I have their 2018 offering, Jord lined up for another day.

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As someone who grew up with…and in many ways refused to move on from them, lately I’ve taken great pleasure in buying CDs from smaller artists on Bandcamp.

I remember in my drumming days the time spent painstakingly reproducing copies of our demo to send out to people, mainly record labels.

When you’re starting out you probably won’t have a record label to do the legwork for you, you have to do that yourself.

Lately I’ve bought two albums where a member of the band appeared on the shipping label. The first was Counting Hours. I love Ilpo Paasela’s voice, whether it be with Counting Hours or The Chant. So, I was tickled pink to see his name appear on the shipping label. Cheers Ilpo.

The second was from my latest obsession, the new album by Enshine, called ‘Elevation’.

If you can imagine that Tom Cruise movie ‘Oblivion’, but with a death/doom soundtrack, that’s probably what ‘Elevation’ would sound like. I loved it, so I ordered the CD from Bandcamp. Sure enough, Jari Lindholm himself appeared on the shipping label.

It could be that feeling of connection –music lovers reaching out to support the artists they enjoy, or just wanting to support those artists who are making their way on their own, but somehow that direct connection hits differently in a world that doesn’t value creativity nearly enough.

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Black Metal, but with Bagpipes…

After publishing my Albums of the Year for 2025, something came my way that took me completely by surprise.

Released in February 2025, the one-man black metal band Saor released Amidst The Ruins.

Musical differences

I tend to rely on friends (and the Qobuz magazine) to push me out of my comfort zone when it comes to music. Left to my own devices I will often wear out my favourites to the point of exhaustion.

Lately some of my friends have been gravitating towards black metal…and I usually struggle with that. Unlike death, specifically progressive or melodic death which tend to be front and centre in the mix, black metal vocals tend to be very recessed, almost quiet. Arguably too quiet.

Sure, you can hear them, they’re in the room with you somewhere. Maybe they’re in the other corner, but they are largely drowned out by the rest of the instrumentation.

With Saor this is still the case. I really like what I can hear of the vocals, but it is the ’everything else’ that provides the secret sauce.

The most recent two Saor albums are infused with Gaelic charm, incorporating tin whistles, Uilleann Pipes, violins and cellos. I believe this sets the music apart from everyone else I’ve heard lately, providing something distinctly Scottish and unquestionably captivating.

At around 8 minutes in, the final track ‘Rebirth’ complete turns on its head and provides a wonderful conclusion to what is a stunning album.

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As the year draws to a close, my Fediverse chums and I have been thinking about the smorgasbord of albums that have released this year.

I don’t think it would be hyperbolic to say it has been a banner year for music that spoke to me. Music is intensely personal and one person’s pleasure is another’s pain, but there was so much from 2025 that will live long with me.

So, here’s my Top 10 Albums:

1. Paradise Lost - Ascension

I’ve already spoken about this one at length here but I continue to be a soft mark and perhaps an unreliable witness for anything they do. I can find something to love about everything they’ve done.

2. REMINA - The Silver Sea

Atmospheric doom with Heike Langhan’s ethereal vocals is not something I can pass up, but add to that the contributions from Mick Moss (Antimatter) and Tony Dunn (Sgaile) and you have an album for the ages.

3. Messa - The Spin

Doom, with a side order of jazz and blues. Sara’s vocals carry that jazzy noir feel, like something you would hear in a black & white hardboiled detective movie. A grand piano in the corner with a glamorous woman signing away, as a gumshoe nurses a glass of Scotch on the rocks. The Spin was a wonderful album.

4. Rivers of Nihil - Rivers of Nihil

Whilst their self-titled album will always and forever be compared to Where Owls Know My Name, they’ve managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat with this one. The change of vocalists had the potential to derail them, but they seem to have come back stronger somehow. Another splendid album that is more consistent than The Work.

5. In Mourning - The Immortal

Of all the bands that were new to me this year, In Mourning were a welcome find. This Swedish melodeath act have put together an album that is as close to perfect as you can get without being perfect.

6. Hangman’s Chair - Saddiction

Stoner-doom, where have you been all my life. I picked up Saddiction based on a recommendation, but then immediately went out and picked up their earlier album A Loner and love that one too. It’s pretty simple stuff, but expertly delivered and with so… much… reverb…

7. Nailed to Obscurity - Generation of the Void

Nailed to Obscurity are another new band for me. This German melodeath act have another winner on their hands. It doesn’t quite hit the lofty heights of In Mourning’s new album, but it is so solid, meaty and right up my street.

8. Psychonaut - World Maker

This was a surprise. Another new band to me, a three-piece from Belgium, technically psychedelic post-metal but could best be described as, what if Peter Gabriel’s Genesis occasionally let rip and growled. Fascinating stuff.

9. An Abstract Illusion - The Sleeping City

Umm…An Abstract Illusion have quickly risen to the top of the tree for me. The new album is fantastic, the previous album is astonishing. I love these guys.

10. Fallujah - Xenotaph

Another solid album from Fallujah. Whilst I sort-of prefer their 2022 release Empyrean, Xenotaph is unquestionably a solid piece of work from this San Francisco tech-death band.

Looking ahead

The coming year, at least on paper, is going to require some exploration, as there is only Insomnium from my usual list of bands that I would expect to have an album in the works. I’m genuinely not sure what I have to look forward to, so I’m going to have to step out of my comfort zone and lean on friends and the Qobuz magazine for inspiration.

I’m more than happy with that. The best albums from this year were arguably the ones I wasn’t expecting and many were not even from this year.

See you in 2026.

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My word it has been a good month for music. The leaves are starting to fall from the trees, the clocks have changed to their winter setting and we can look forward to a lot of darkness for the next 6 months.

Fittingly, October has been a month of both death and doom.

An Abstract Illusion - The Sleeping City (2025)

Hailing from Sweden, An Abstract Illusion walk that line between technical death metal and melodic death metal. Arguably they are closer to the technical side than someone like Insomnium, but they manage to weave in such beauty between the ferocious growls and blast beats. Think Blood Incantation, with a hint of Fallujah.

The most striking thing about the opener, Blackmurmur, is the use of keyboards to provide a counter to the meaty guitars. An Abstract Illusion also scratch that itch of mine –a mixture of growls and clean vocals. The growls are invariably deep, purposeful and imposing, which makes the cleans that little bit of sunshine between the clouds.

The Sleeping City is my first exposure to this band, but I was hooked on the first listen. This immediately had me working backwards onto their 2022 album, Woe.

You can get it from Bandcamp here: anabstractillusion.bandcamp.com/album/the…

An Abstract Illusion - Woe (2022)

I could understand someone who has followed AAI from the beginning being slightly disappointed with The Sleeping City after listening to Woe. However, I think it would be unfair to suggest The Sleeping City is anything less than great. The trouble is, Woe is astonishing.

If anyone asks you what they should listen to if they are looking for some technical death metal, you send them to Woe. It has everything. It is the sort of album where it almost feels wrong to pick out individual tracks, as it is more of a complete piece from tracks 1 to 7. The tracks often run into one another but each has an identity of its own. Thankfully, it is the sort of album where you can start at track 1 and keep going right until the end without even a hint of boredom creeping in.

Tracks like ’Tear Down This Holy Mountain’ and ’In The Heavens You Will Become A Monster’ are the highlights for me, not just from the album but for the whole year. The former bringing in some classy guitar noodling in a relatively peaceful bridge; the latter breaking out in some searing female vocals courtesy of Lovisa Strindell.

I love how tech-death can throw almost anything at you and for it to fit right in. Any vocal style, any tempo, sometimes several different tempos and time signatures within a single song. It never gets old, it always surprises. Woe is a fantastic album.

You can get it from Bandcamp here: anabstractillusion.bandcamp.com/album/woe

REMINA - The Silver Sea

It is no secret that I’m a bit of a soft mark for anything Heike Langhans shares with the world. I can’t get enough of her ethereal vocals. She was great with Draconian, but I think she has really hit her stride with REMINA and Light Field Reverie.

The Silver Sea is the second full album from the minds of Heike and Mike Lamb and will feel right at home for anyone who enjoyed Strata or their recent EP, Erebus.

However, there are some additional bonuses in this one. Antimatter’s Mick Moss shares vocal duties with Heike in ‘Algol’. Mick has a very distinctive voice and has become a staple in the world of doom in his own right. Algol is a wonderful track, which is followed by the second guest spot, none other than Tony Dunn, the one-man band who appears under the name Sgàile.

Tony also has a great voice, which you can hear much more of in his 2024 release, Traverse the Bealach. His contribution to Vanta Ray is no less great here.

The Silver Sea weighs in at a far-too-short-for-me 43 minutes across its 7 tracks, but there are no duds on this one. It is another album that I can enjoy from beginning to end. However, if I was going to be picky, Algol, Vanta Ray and Io are my current favourites.

You can get it from Bandcamp here: remina.bandcamp.com/album/the…

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Albums that hooked me in September 2025

It has been a good month for releases if you share my tastes in death and doom. I’m not sure if I’m going to make a habit of these lists, but if there’s something worth talking about in October, you never know.

Paradise Lost - Ascension

I’ve already shared my thoughts on the new Paradise Lost album. I’m not unbiased in this as I have been listening to these guys since the mid 90s, but any new release from the gloomy crew from the north of England is a momentous occasion.

Thankfully, it was so good I bought it twice, once on Qobuz, once on CD. That thing’s a keeper.

In Mourning - The Immortal

Released at the very end of August, In Mourning’s latest release ‘The Immortal’ is a solid slab of melodic death metal from deepest darkest Sweden.

I adore melodic death metal for its ability to blend brutality with an unmistakable sense of harmony. The Immortal masterfully blends both harsh and clean vocals, brutal riffs with melodic leads. Highlights include ‘Silver Crescent’, ‘Song of the Cranes’ and ‘Sojourner’.

Nailed to Obscurity - Generation of the Void

Releasing on the 5th September, Generation of the Void was my first taste of German death-doom crew Nailed to Obscurity. I really like what I’ve heard so far.

I’d probably categorise ‘Generation of the Void’ as more melodeath, but there’s a definite hint of doom in there too. As with In Mourning, there’s a lovely blend of harsh and clean vocals at work here too.

Highlights include ‘Overcast’, ‘Echo Attempt’ and ‘The Ides of Life’.

Honourable Mentions

Between the Buried and Me - The Blue Nowhere

Between the Buried and Me released their new album ‘The Blue Nowhere’ on 12th September.

This album is completely mad. There’s bits of death, bits of funk and a lot of prog to bind it all together.

Whilst I enjoyed it, it didn’t grip my as hard as the three mentioned earlier. It can be a difficult listen at times, but it is undeniably impressive what these guys have put together.

Counting Hours - Dreaming in the Mire

It is always a good day when Counting Hours release new material. However, this was one new track and a proper release of Wintry Insight, which previously appeared on an unreleased demo.

I love both tracks, but hopefully the rest of the album will follow along soon. I will probably buy it immediately, because it is Counting Hours.

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I’m sure there has been a time in your life where you caught a few notes of a song on the TV or radio only for it to get its hooks into you and never let go?

What if you didn’t know what it was and had no way to track it down? That happened to me at a time when there was no internet, no Shazam or even a schedule on the ol’ TV. This is a story about that time.

It was the 90s, man…

Picture the scene… It was around 1993 and Little G was on the customary six week summer break from school. Little G spent much of that time watching any old trash on daytime TV in those days. These were long, lazy days of watching anything on the four TV channels we had and eating beans on toast. Good times.

Thankfully, kids TV was much better back then and there was usually a film on in the middle of the afternoon. One day, I became engrossed in a film about someone pretending to be a boy so they could get into a band. At the end of the movie there was a song that I really, really enjoyed, but I had no idea what the film was, let alone the song.

Back then we had purely analogue TV and whilst Teletext existed, we didn’t have it on our wood-panelled TV. The only way to know what you were watching was to catch the opening credits or buy the TV guide, which I hadn’t.

This song would proceed to live rent-free in my head throughout the 90s, the 2000s and even the beginning of the 2010s. I went roughly 25 years without hearing that song again.

Around 2010 I found myself with an hour-long drive to work every day. The day would start around 6:00am and I would tune the car’s radio to the local station, until I lost the signal halfway down the motorway. One morning, I caught the end of that song again.

It was just the last few bars, but the DJ didn’t say what it was. The frustration continued.

Bicycles…

In around 2015 I found myself diving head-first into the world of cycling. I even had a blog about my adventures and discoveries cycling around my home city. This was also the time when Twitter was still good.

A chance post about bicycles in movies caught my eye one afternoon in an all-too-frequent scrolling session (it wasn’t that doomy back then).

In that movie, there was a scene where this group of kids were cycling through their town and I knew immediately it was the movie I was looking for. It turned out to be called The Challengers.

The Challengers was a made-for-TV movie from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), released in 1990 but first aired over here in 1993.

The song turned out to be by Jon & Vangelis and it was called ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’. In 2025 I finally have the album on CD and it neatly ties up a few strange coincidences.

It would be only a few years later that I would be teaching myself to play the guitar, followed by the drums and getting into bands, recording demos and playing gigs anywhere that would take us. I would also encounter Vangelis again in the sublime Blade Runner soundtrack.

These days you can just reach for your smartphone and get an app to identify the song for you, but those were simpler times. I am starting to wonder whether trying to find my way back to this song has influenced the directions I have taken in my life so far. Was it Vangelis’ distinctive sound that drew me to Blade Runner? Was it the idea of performing on stage in The Challengers what steered me towards music?

Perhaps I am over-thinking it, but it does make me wonder.

G.

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It is not every day you get a new Paradise Lost album to talk about, but thankfully today is one of those days.

You’ll remember from my previous gushing blogpost about Draconian Times that Paradise Lost has been a feature of my life for well, most of it. I’m not exactly an objective witness. There will be some (30+ year) bias ahead.

Ascension, which released today (19th September) might be one of their finest albums to date. Weighing in at almost exactly an hour, save for 54 stray seconds, it pulls in bits of their more death/doom metal chapters from the early 90s, re-discovered in the late 2010s and 2020s with some distinct Icon / Shades of God vibes, mixed in with more modern (think Obsidian, Icon 30) production sensibilities.

This isn’t to say they completely discarded the One Second/Host phase. The maturity of their songwriting evident in that era is still in play here too, but without the Sisters of Mercy inspired rhythms. Thankfully we still have HOST and their 2023 album IX to scratch that particular itch.

Nick and Gregor appear to be at the top of their game with Ascension. Nick delivering some of his customary growls and gutturals, but also some wonderful, often harmonised cleans in the choruses. I have a particular weakness for artists that manage to blend the growling with the singing, which has drawn me to melodic death metal and technical death metal in recent times. It has been wonderful to hear Paradise Lost gradually introduce more and more of this this to their sound over the years, particularly with their previous album Obsidian, with tracks like ‘Darker Thoughts’ and ‘The Devil Embraced’.

Paradise Lost’s trademark has always been Gregor Mackintosh’s lead guitar work, which act more like a second vocal than a standalone part. There are solos, of course, but Gregor’s melodies run throughout and keep the momentum going, allowing Nick to focus on bringing the misery.

The whole package feels incredibly meaty, consistent and quintessentially Paradise Lost.

From the songs they didn’t release as singles, Salvation has what I just talked about in spades, but Lay a Wreath, Sirens, and This Stark Town are future classics. Crucially, there’s no filler; no wasted time; no songs that I feel the need to skip. It’s a rare quality I’ve found in very few albums (Draconian Times, Whitechapel’s ‘Kin’ and Insomnium’s ‘Shadows of the Dying Sun’ aside).

If there is to be a weak point, I’d say ‘Diluvium’ doesn’t reach quite the lofty heights of the others, but that is not to say it is bad. It is just not as excellent as the others. I don’t think being sat between ‘Lay a Wreath’ and ‘Savage Days’ helps, because those two are fantastic.

I’m really happy to have Ascension in my collection. Paradise Lost really knocked this one out of the park.

Where to find it:

On Qobuz: open.qobuz.com/album/o89… On Bandcamp: paradiselostofficial.bandcamp.com/album/asc… Listenbrainz: listenbrainz.org/album/d40… On their website: paradiselost.co.uk

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Peter Gabriel is someone I’ve had on my radar for quite some time. I have a copy of his seminal album ‘So’ and I love it, but I didn’t really delve any deeper than that.

Today I stumbled upon a live version of my favourite Gabriel song, ‘In Your Eyes’ from his 1993 tour and it completely bowled me over.

It’s a celebration more than it is a song, but it features Paula Cole and Papa Wemba. Paula cuts through so clearly against Peter’s slightly gritty delivery, particularly as she enters on this track (at 1:20). Papa brings in his own special sauce, delivering some native Wolof lines with some warm and earthy tones.

I also can’t ignore Tony Levin’s legendary bass lines. Needless to say, I have the blu-ray on order as well as a copy of the album. Wow.

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After seeing Microsoft speed-running the end of the Xbox brand, culminating in more cancellations and thousands more jobs deleted from existence, I’m reminded of an unfortunate truth about cultural artefacts and the nature of public companies –they don’t belong together.

For clarity, when I refer to public companies, I mean those whose shares are available for the great unwashed to buy from exchanges or their broker of choice. A great many companies involved in the games industry are public –Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, TakeTwo etc.

Their job, above all else, is to provide value to shareholders. The line must always go up. Either the price of a share needs to increase, or you need to kick back enough in dividends to keep investors interested.

The main reason why they are not compatible with culture is, culture is never a one-size-fits-all thing. It is meant to provoke a reaction in people. It is meant to ask questions that may not have cute, cuddly answers.

Public companies want to make things that have the broadest appeal, that is not going to make waves or make anyone feel anything that might be considered unpleasant. It has to be neutral, it has to be safe, or someone might not like it. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about games, music, movies or paintings. Are you making art, or the wall it is mounted to?

As that saying goes, those that try to please everybody, end up pleasing nobody. Without Xbox, Microsoft has no product that customers would use were they not forced to by their employer’s IT department. A company bereft of culture; a 3.65 trillion dollar super-massive black hole.

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Whilst early metal music may have been fairly one-dimensional, in 2025 I put it to you that there is probably a sub-genre of metal for everyone.

There was a study ‘Charting the Universe of Metal Music Lyrics and Analyzing Their Relation to Perceived Audio Hardness’ by Isabella Czedik-Eysenberg, Oliver Wieczorek, Arthur Flexer and Christoph Reuter published in 2024 which scanned through 124,288 song lyrics and mapped them out. It also charted the perceived heaviness of the songs.

It then plotted the various themes covered by these songs on a grid against the subgenre in Figure 6.

If you were ever wondering what to listen to, but had a psychological itch you needed to scratch, Figure 6 may help you figure it out.

However, the answer is probably going to be Insomnium and their extraordinary album from 2014, ‘Shadows of the Dying Sun’.

All the pain and suffering;

Will dispirit or feed you, dispirit or feed you;

For each and every time your failures will craft you;

When the fear of them is gone, fear is gone.

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It was 1995 and the world of heavy metal was at a crossroads. Metallica had drifted from its thrash roots to something more polished and mature with The Black Album; the hair metal of the 80s was becoming a distant memory and even the more extreme forms were starting to mellow.

Paradise Lost, not to be outdone were also starting to fill out their previously oppressive and bleak sound with melodies and string arrangements. Icon, released in 1993 had a beautifully warm sound and was far easier on the ear than 1992’s Shades of God. Yet it was easy to tell both albums came from the same artist.

It was 1995’s Draconian Times that would take the formula into a whole new level.

A New The Black Album

This may seem like a reductive sub-heading, but there is a good reason for it. When Draconian Times released, it arrived in a limited edition box, complete with a beautifully designed booklet and artwork. The outer box was completely black, just a sticker on the front to tell you what was inside.

The black album comparisons don’t stop there though. Like Metallica’s self-titled album, a more concise and accessible progression from where they had traveled between Master of Puppets and …and justice for all, Draconian Times was a further refinement of what Paradise Lost had achieved with Icon.

Icon always sounded warm to me. The mids were very forward, the bass and treble slightly recessed, so the drums didn’t have a lot of impact. They would go on to rectify this somewhat in their re-recording from 2023 (they didn’t own the rights to the 1993 recording of Icon, the label did, so they had to re-record it and put new artwork on it), but Draconian Times had a more lifelike sound. The bass drums have more of a slap, the snare cuts through nicely and the guitars fill the space allowing Nick Holmes to deliver his raspy vocals over the top.

The vocals, much like with Icon, are more tuneful than they were in Gothic or Shades of God. Think singing angrily rather than a death-metal growl.

From a songwriting perspective, Draconian Times continues the doom and despair themes from previous albums, but the album is paced in such a way that the songs stand on their own rather than all bleeding into one, like Metallica’s last three albums have (oof, did you really have to go there?).

Enchantment starts us off with a piano and big pondering riffs, before upping the pace with Hallowed Land, but even that has a piano bridge to provide some breathing space. The Last Time and Forever Failure change things up again before Shadowkings and Elusive Cure provide some airy and dare I say it, progressive stylings.

It is the middle of the album where Draconian Times really hits its stride. Shadowkings, Elusive Cure and Yearn For Change may be the best songs Paradise Lost has ever released. They are unmistakably Paradise Lost songs, but they are songs that I can’t help but sing along to.

This is not to say the rest of the album is bad, far from it. Shades of God, Hands of Reason and I See Your Face are absolutely fantastic, but if I was to be picky, that middle three are untouchable.

Jaded is the last song and is the closest thing to a ballad on this record, but it is the point in the record where I realise it is nearly over. Now, I’ve been listening to this regularly since it was released in 1995. My first exposure to Paradise Lost was from a Kerrang cover CD, but since the album was released it has been never far from my side.

It is 2025 now and I’m still not in any way shape or form bored of Draconian Times. It has been 30 years, but I still can’t get enough of it.

If you’ve not listened to it yet, you’ll find it here: https://listenbrainz.org/album/564ebe39-4d24-32c7-982d-416149393780/

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