?Classics? of power metal #15: PALADIN - Ascension (2019), early impressions

Previous exposure to this artist/album:  Half-listened to a song once on YouTube, had to hear more.

None of us multitask as well as we imagine we do.  I know for a fact that my retention of music is basically zero unless I'm devoting time to listen to it.  Yet I do imagine that half-listening to something during work is a useful "initial screen" to decide if something's worth devoting actual music time to.  That's where I kinda fell in love with the idea of Paladin.  I was sampling one of their songs, can't remember which one, and was struck immediately by the immediately catchy heft that, as half of my brain told me, so neatly balanced power metal and death metal.  There have of course been loads of power/death bands and that crossover started way before 2019, but how often does a song catch the aesthetics of both equally convincingly, with its two singers playing off each other?  Hearing that Paladin only had managed to put out one record to date, that they were your classic band of a few Americans playing music for love to no real renown with the the biz very much not paying their bills, cemented the idea that they might be this really amazing discovery.  Paladin were going to be one of those relatively obscure acts like Falconer that were just absolutely for me.   I'd already come up with my list of power metal records to survey and started my project, but I had to add Paladin post-hoc.

Those who have actually, you know, listened to Ascension will of course recognize that the record that existed in my head as described above bears little resemblance to the real thing.  For one, as best as I can tell there aren't two singers, with Taylor Washington, who is otherwise as best as I can tell known more as a guitarist than as a singer*, credited with supplying the vast majority of the vocal output.  For another, Ascension is not a death metal record.  Not even a little.  So it was just a fun and interesting experience to come in expecting a death/power hybrid and starting with "Awakening,"** a lively song about a journey over the seas that enthusiastically embraces the exact sound I've come to associate with power metal.  Nary a growl in sight, but with a grit in the singing and guitars that makes it sound closer to Running Wild than to Kamelot on the intensity axis.  

Listened to in order, "Awakening" sets the stage the delightful introduction of deeper bass and harsher vocals on "Divine Providence."  Obviously my brain had processed that gruffness as extreme vocals while half-listening, but it's actually still singing rather than growling, just in a gruff manner.  Taylor only occasionally drifts against the edges of a black metal gargle, and never really goes full death growl.  Maybe the end of "Vagrant" could maybe kinda sorta sound death vox if one isn't actually paying close attention.  The instrumentation doesn't sound deathened in the slightest - whatever that actually means (super down tuning?  Blast beats?) I feel like I know it when I hear it, and I don't hear it here - so I guess that also shows what a vocal-focused listener I am.  We're left with antoher band that reinterprets traditional metal through the lens of vintage power in a way that straddles USPM and EUPM in the same broad corner of the metalsphere as Lovebites.  It's a fun corner!  And the bands don't sound all that similar despite their hearts seeming to be in similar places.  Whereas Lovebites got their extra burst of energy from a speedy poppy light, Paladin are keen to tune down an extra step and play the riffs in a repetitious back and forth pattern that's basically full on thrash on some songs and more thrash influenced on others.  In that context getting guttural with the singing fits right in with the thrash asethetic, as do the chant-along parts in several mid-album choruses.  It's not only the vocals that scream "thrash" to me - I don't know how one can call the main riff from, say, "Call Of The Night," or the one from "Fall From Grace," anything else.  I can at least take solace in the fact that I'd "correctly" (I guess) quickly recategorized the band as power/thrash within a few songs into my first listen, before looking up the few online sites that talk about them and give them that exact designation. 

 

Blah blah blah, expecting one particular subgenre hybrid and got a different one, yeah, cool story, bro.  But enough of that.  Did I like Ascension?  Did it make me feel anything to listen to it?  Yeah.  I think the conviction is key here.  It's amazing that Taylor isn't primarily known as a vocalist, because he has one of those metal voices where the cleans are thoroughly melodic and the high notes are on point, but always sounding rich, never thin or shrill.  When he encourages the adventurer to whom he's singing that the memories they have will live on, I don't doubt that the narrator believes it.  Five years before everyone lost their shit over Fellowship*** doing thoroughly earnest heart-on-sleeve power metal beholden to the past with the spark of youth, here's a weightier, more proteinaceous version of that.

The double guitar attack is the other biggest trait of the music for me so far. Taylor and Alex do seem to be running the show; I don't know their division of labor.  The songs are built around guitar primarily, with everything else purely support.  Most of the instrumental showpiece sections sound great, heavy metal with the emphasis on heavy.  I think they go on too long on average.  Not unfocused or with parts that aren't good; I just wish they'd do the exact same thing only 25% of less of it.  

My early thought is that Paladin are at their best when the elements of a song complement each other through diversity.  Ascension leans surprisingly light on having the different vocal styles "talk" to each other like I enjoy so much when Judicator do it.  Instead, they'll do something more like "Call of The Night," throwing a particularly thrashy riff (again, a two note pattern played fast and occasionally going up or down the scale), singing basically a USPM melody line over it, then climbing to basically a EUPM chorus, and then dropping into a thrashy growl to end the chorus on a dark note.  And then going off on a lively uptempo guitar solo.  Our versatile vocalist embodies light and depression (or at least the inevitability of death, or something) in very quick succession.  The song is less than four minutes, and it takes the listener on quite the journey.  

My early thought is that that they're at their "worst," although I don't know if that's the right term, in the sense that Ascension kinda only has one mode.  Even for a band that's not particularly proggy, having so much going on within every song is always a double edged sword, because that goes hand in hand with the individual tracks blurring together into a homogenous mass.  The mass is pleasant enough that I'm willing to roll with it, though.  I dunno, I originally underrated the Lovebites record and had to revise my "score" way up, and I've had a lot on my mind this week that might explain why the hooks aren't sticking that hard, and, I dunno,  these songs just have that feeling like they're going to click harder with each listen.  So, I'll try giving someone the benefit of the doubt this time.  4 out of 5 as a prelim rating sounds right.

Actually, you know how I know this band's sound is working for me overall?  I grinned, rather madly, midway through my second listen of "Black Omen" when it abruptly hit me that the song is probably about Chrono Trigger.  In another band's hands, I would have cringed.

Favorite track:  "Call Of The Night"

Runner up:  "Awakening"

Least favorite track:  "Shoot For The Sun"

Way way early rating:  4/5

Next:  More on Ascension, whenever I get around to it!

*Perhaps most prominently in more recent times for his work with Theocracy.  What little I know about them is that they're a Christian power metal act that seems to have achieved some legit crossover success in the secular music world.  Or at least whatever counts as "crossover success" in a niche genre like PM.

**If it's not already, that should be part of a power metal drinking game built on selecting random albums.  "Drink if your record has a track called 'Awakening.'  Two drinks if it's the first track." 

***To be clear, I do like Fellowship, but your typical power metal aficionado seems to be just over the moon about them.  Come to think of it, Fellowship may actually be the one band that most informed my posture when starting this writing project.  Remember when my whole shtick was all "I enjoy power metal, yet I don't totally understand it and I don't think I love it.  Maybe I'm not capable of loving it...."?  My reaction to The Saberlight Chronicles vs the reaction from the metal world at large is the microcosm of that.