Opeth belongs to a new breed of experimental death-metallers that includes the likes of Cynic, Carcass, Amorphis, and My Dying Bride. But whereas Carcass, Amorphis, and My Dying Bride have experimented with their music by making it more accessible and "commercial," Opeth has made death metal even less commercial. True, Opeth's brand of death metal contains many soft parts, but even the soft parts of their music are eclectic by traditional metal standards.
I would describe Opeth as a mixture of Spanish-style baroque music, doom metal, goth, and traditional death metal. The vocals combine elements of black and death metal: harsh and abrasive like black metal, relatively low-pitched like death metal. The guitars vary among several styles. Generally, Opeth's music is not at all riff-intensive, thus bucking the contemporary trend. They do have a few brutal riffs in the classic death metal style, but most of their metal guitar is of the hook and solo sort, with the lead guitar predominating over the rhythm guitar. The electric lead guitar hooks interplay with the Spanish-style classical guitar that peppers this album. The music follows this general pattern: buildup (when the electric guitar breaks in on a classical guitar interlude), climax (typically when the deathy vocals break into the mix), denouement (when the vocals depart, and the music slows or softens), and interlude (when the classical guitar has free reign, often with clean vocals). Thus, the album is split about half and half between soft and heavy parts. The final song, "To Bid You Farewell," is mostly soft and has entirely clean vocals. For this reason, many fans of traditional death metal hate this album.
The songs are extremely long. There are five tracks on this album totaling sixty-six minutes of music. One song is over twenty minutes long. The chief weakness of these songs' structure, as might be expected, are the twin dangers of repetitiveness and incohesiveness. There are quite a few good hooks in this album, but a few of them wear thin through repetition. In spots, it becomes tedious to listen to the album too closely. Furthermore, some of the songs' structures are incohesive: there are no common themes running through each song. For example, the twenty-minute song stops and starts again at three separate points.
The lyrics (in English, though the band is Swedish) are quite good for non-native speakers of English. They seem to combine traditional elements of both doom metal and gothic music. From doom metal, they borrow the heavy use of naturalistic imagery, and from gothic music they derive the frequent themes of sex, romance, and wooing from afar (e.g., "You stand in a forest unknown, a secret orchard/And your voice is vast and achromatic, but still so precious"). Perhaps they could be compared with My Dying Bride in this respect, although unlike MDB they have completely abandoned the gore imagery of traditional death/grind.
Fans of progressive, ambient, gothic, doom, and technical death metal should enjoy this album immensely. Those who lean toward genres like industrial and grindcore probably will not. For its type of music, I give it a 9 out of 10. I have heard that their previous album, "Orchid," was even better, more technical, and more diverse. If so, it must indeed be a work of art.
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