Description

Japan pressing with OBI-strip, Japanese lyric sheet and two bonus tracks

With Law Of The Blade things really started to look bright for Paragon. This was without doubt the best Paragon album up to this point. First of all, the production has greatly improved. A very meaty and full sound is displayed, with the guitars being very much in the ‘Painkiller’ vein, just with that extra typical German, “crunchy” touch to them. The balance between the instruments works perfectly here, especially with the guitars having been pushed much more forward – the mixing job that really plagued the previous release has indeed gone through an improvement as well. A top-notch production job done by Piet Sielck here – again; in a way similar-sounding to the last, but just better and also a lot heavier. The quality of the songs is another improvement, as everything appears to be “pushed up” a level. It’s like you take ‘Steelbound’, and make the good songs on that album even better and make the weaker ones drag a lot less. There are about as many “better” tracks on this release as there was on the previous; actually, this album is structurally very similar to the previous one (like when you compare ‘Master of Puppets’ with ‘Ride the Lightning’, where track one is the fast and heavy opener, track two the more epic title track, track three the mid-paced number, and so on). There’s the same strong “opening trilogy” that stands out a bit more than the rest of the album, track five is a slower number, track seven is midpaced and the ballad is placed as the second last track; however, the ballad on ‘Steelbound’ is placed at the very end, so if you’d switch the two last track on this release, it would have the exact same structure. The rest are all fast numbers. The opening trilogy once deserves a special mention; we could be talking high 80s in overall score had this level of quality been kept throughout the whole album. “Abducted” is just fucking vicious; a true beast of a speed metal number. Terrific execution here, just check out those really cool noisy leads between 0.13 and 0.25; how they just work so incredibly well without being anything particularly special on their own. So any of you German-metal diggers out there should check this album up, it contains some killing songs absolutely.

Track list:
1. Abducted
2. Palace Of Sin
3. Armies Of The Tyrant
4. Law Of The Blade
5. Across The Wastelands
6. Shadow World
7. Allied Forces
8. Empires Fall
9. The Journeys End
10. Back To Globy
11. To Hell And Back Again-Saxon cover
12. Reign Of Fear-live