Not exactly, though its slightly in the same vein!
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7. Opeth – Blackwater Park (2001) ‘Blackwater Park’ is, like ‘El Cielo’ probably here to stay in the top 10. There’s no doubt that this album is here to stay in the top 10 for quite some time to come. Though I lump this album In the same sentence as the previous one, my love for ‘Blackwater Park’ goes much farther back than that for the dredg album in the previous update. Plus, where the dredg album is simply a bunch of great music tracks linked together on the album (yes, I’m trivialising, read the previous update to know how I feel about the album), this album by Opeth did something I would not have thought would ever be possible in my music preferences up to that point: it made me tolerate, appreciate and later love growls. This might be insignificant to some, for me this was a turning point in the music I could listen to.
I must have been around fifteen or sixteen when I first heard Opeth. It was before ‘Watershed’ was released, so definitely before 2008. Although I don’t know how old I was exactly, I remember very well my first listening experience with Opeth. I was browsing new music, and came across this band. On Youtube, the track
The Drapery Falls was recommended, and, being the curious music explorer I am, starting listening. I loved what I heard, and I was surprised I never heard this band before. The beauty of the song struck me and… then the growls came in. I was distraught, turned it off almost immediately. How could they do this to this beautiful track? It ruined the song, or so I thought. Something happened then and there, because I would return to the same song not much later and I’m 100% sure that it was mainly through this track that I got to appreciate growls. I understood what they were doing with the growls, that the band had multiple facets and that growling would be one of them. The best music-related lesson I ever learned is that there can be no ‘heavy’ if there would be no ‘soft’ to contrast the heaviness;
The Drapery Falls is a fantastic example of that. It would turn out to be not only favourite of the album, but also my favourite Opeth track. It’s funny how one track can switch your stance on growls forever. Although I can’t really stand bands that do nothing but growls (for there has to be something to contrast the heaviness), this is the track – and later the album – that turned out to be a turning point.
Despite being my favourite, I doubt that it’s actually the ‘best’ track on the album. In past survivors on DTF,
Bleak would come out as the album’s best track and honestly, I agree. Composed very different than the almost ethereal ‘
Drapery’,
Bleak features singer/guitarist/mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt growling in the verse, and him singing clean in duet with no-one other than Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree in the chorus. A lengthy middle section finds the band departed from the progressive death metal sound heard in the beginning of the track to acoustic clean guitar playing with clean vocals. The chorus returns once again, and the song comes full circle at the end with a return to growls.
Opeth are pretty much a metal band (you could contest that nowadays, considering their last two releases, but on this album there’s no question about that), but despite this, they do not often write songs that are based on riffs. And when they do, the riffs as such are not really that obvious. A lot of their material is based on chord progressions and melodies. Actually, most of their songs feature at least one section of acoustic guitar playing, which is also the thing that made them stand out from all the other (progressive) death metal bands when they started out.
Harvest is a track that has no distorted guitars or growls whatsoever, and
Patterns in the Ivy is a completely acoustic instrumental.
Dirge for November starts with an acoustic passage with vocals, erupts into heavy metal goodness and ends with a 2-minute clean guitar passage. As these examples should exemplify, Opeth are good at doing multiple things – but the thing they do best is combine stuff that’s seemingly incompatible.
I’d say Opeth has a very distinct sound to them, one that is the most apparent on this particular record. They’re heavy, but they are melodic as well. They can easily switch between calm serenity and pure brutality where needed and this is made possible mostly by Åkerfeldt’s great aptitude as both a clean singer and a grunter. Opeth is a band that relies mostly on repeating sound textures in the shape of chord progressions, rather than on concrete building blocks in the form of riffs or extreme technical parts. They have guitar solos, although they’re very situational, nor ever overly virtuosic.
Basically every song on this album is fantastic, or else it would not stand a chance against the rest of their excellent discography, but apart from the two tracks I’ve ignored completely (here’s a shout out to both
The Leper Affinity and
The Funeral Portrait!), there’s one more track I feel I should highlight in particular and that’s the closing track from this album.
Blackwater Park, the album’s title-track contains everything there is about Opeth packed into 12 minutes. Let’s just leave it at that, this write-up is long enough as it is already. I don’t really have much to say anymore on this particular record to be honest. Opeth were such an important discovery for my musical taste development and I still listen to them quite often. Like with pretty much every album in this top 10, I could theoretically go into detail on every single track, but it would be better to just listen to the actual album.
Favourite song: The Drapery Falls
Other songs worth checking out: Bleak, Blackwater Park, Harvest
Other stuff by this band: My other favourites by them are ‘My Arms, Your Hearse’ and ‘Still Life’. Generally ‘Ghost Reveries’ is considered a fan favourite, an excellent album as well. The band adopted more of a prog-rock style on their latest two albums, the growls are absent there. The band’s first two albums feature heavy black metal influences. Overall, you can’t really go wrong with any album, if you know what to expect beforehand.