Tragic Idol

Released in 2012, Tragic Idol is Paradise Lost's 13th studio album, and fourth since re-embracing heavy metal as their guiding light, to the delight of most fans, pundits, and, one would guess, the record labels, tour promoters, and other music business entities picking up the tab. In fact, with each passing year, the group's mid-career deep dive into electronica (roughly between 1997's One Second and 2002's Symbol of Life) feels like less of a big deal and more of a bemusing, almost necessary lost weekend -- not to mention a useful argument with which to rebuff anyone who would dare suggest PL are resting on their laurels when they're really just giving fans exactly what they clamored for. All this bears addressing because Tragic Idol, with its newly penned catalog of sublime paeans to misery, both woeful and willful, is essentially part two of 1993's watershed Icon LP, aesthetically speaking: it's really nothing new under the sun, but just what the Devil ordered, by and large. Famili