Opeth

It's been since their debut "Orchid" (1995) that Sweden's Opeth have been chasing a progressive death metal that has them constantly competing with themselves. It's an ongoing challenge, a search for balance between the bestial and the poetic, the instinctive and the intellectual, one that brings together the Swedish school and seventies prog-rock. The blueprint for their charismatic approach is laid out in the lengthy "In Mist She Was Standing", the first of many colossal tracks in a career often built on extended pieces, so intricate they've earned the respect of progressive music fans well beyond the metal crowd. Singer, guitarist, composer and leader Mikael Åkerfeldt is the driving force steering this creative tension toward results like "Morningrise" (1996), an album marked by the masterpiece "Black Rose Immortal". The clear decadent and gothic references tint the old blacks with sepia, but it's still the dynamic between ferocity and intimacy that makes the third album, "My Harms Your Hearse" (1998), shine, achieving a tighter, less scattered synthesis.

Although the Swedes' creative process is a continuous one, progressive in spirit and not merely on the surface, the arrival of "Still Life" (1999) feels like a landing point after years of arduous pilgrimage. It's just the first part of a trilogy that establishes Opeth as one of the most important names in prog-metal, and it finds its fullest expression on "Blackwater Park" (2001), further proof that this fusion of folk, death metal and prog-rock elements is remarkably fertile and vast territory.

Mikael Åkerfeldt begins work on Opeth's fifth album while visiting a friend in Stockholm, Sweden, recording demos there. Named after the little-known German prog-rock band of the same name, it's a work deeply marked by the collaboration with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, marking the start of a long friendship. Wilson's impact on the final result can't be overstated: his gift for melody and his love of Pink Floyd-rooted prog-rock contributed, even by Mikael Åkerfeldt's own admission, to the start of a new phase in Opeth's career.

As often happens, the surrounding context also helps, through its own dynamics, to bring about a gem like this album. The turn of the millennium is in fact a period of stylistic expansion, including in the world of death metal, greatly widening the possibilities of the style: not only do Opeth find in Wilson the means to carry out their hybridization, but it's also a favourable moment for such novelty to be well received by fans. Crossover has already happened, prog-metal is by now well established, and there's little left to play in traditional death metal that hasn't already been done ten times over by ten different bands. Not least, Wilson absorbed from his beloved Pink Floyd that magical ability to make even a long, convoluted track digestible, leaning on melancholy as a universal emotional glue.

The scale of "Blackwater Park" is imposing: just 8 tracks but a full 67 minutes, with three pieces running past the ten-minute mark. It opens with "The Leper Affinity", and what an opening it is, a track that would go on to become one of the finest of their career, a furious sonic assault that nonetheless finds moments of relative calm, before closing, after more than 10 minutes, in a melancholy nocturnal piano sonata. More than the broad stylistic range, what stands out is how the band manages to render the nuances that carry from one soundscape to another, letting atmospheric and emotional continuity be the common thread, affirming the closeness between scream and whisper, between roar and weeping.

And it's melancholy again that sustains other extended tracks such as the lengthy "Bleak", running over nine minutes, a death-metal dance inlaid with folk that brightens into melodic passages and guitar interplay, before its overwhelming and moving closing climax. The same sense of subtle anguish pervades "The Drapery Falls", a melodic prog-metal piece driven by melodic scales, which only in a central section turns into tormented death metal before regaining its stately composure and sorrow.

From the melancholy of "Dirge For November" to the funereal, it's a short step, and one lingers in tears before the pain bites again, turning sadness into torment, and finally allowing a return to inward reflection, guided by a guitar that treads softly, as if unwilling to disturb such an intimate moment.

Even sadder, if possible, is "Harvest", a more conventional folk ballad, albeit dressed with exquisite arrangement details: a track that, together with "Patterns In The Ivy", a brief and touching instrumental confession dominated by piano, forms the poetic heart of the album.

The towering "Blackwater Park" (12 minutes) ideally closes the circle, tasked with bringing to an end the tracklist of an imposing, wide-ranging album. It does so by bringing together ferocity and sophistication, brutality and elegance, blind fury and atmospheric digression. In the long psychedelic swirl of guitar melodies, in a passage worthy of Pink Floyd that stands as a shining example of Wilson's production genius, it almost drifts into hypnotic trance, only to blow a fuse when the intimate soul once again gives way to the death-metal beast, barely contained within boulder-crushing riffs that scarcely conceal Opeth's fearsome power, still bent on annihilating the listener with their own idea of violence in music.

It's not easy to find fitting comparisons for an album so compositionally rich and refined, at once visceral and brooding. In this apparent paradox, in the unstable third way between ferocity and poetry, Opeth find a whole territory to explore, one well mapped out through long, shifting compositions. What's more, Opeth best convey the completeness of their work when heard in full: what's presented across the first seven tracks finds its ideal resolution in the long, eponymous closing composition.

In 2017 Rolling Stone included it in its list of the greatest metal albums of all time, while in 2020 the folks at Loudwire crowned it the greatest prog-metal album of all time. It was praised, on the occasion of its 10th-anniversary remaster, by Pitchfork, historically quite selective when it comes to metal, while it earned the title of best album of 2001 from metal webzine Metal Storm, which also ranks it as the third greatest metal album ever made. Similarly enthusiastic praise has come from the likes of Decibel, Terrorizer and MetalSucks.

It can't be said that its success was quite as significant with the wider public, which is hardly surprising given the richness and complexity of the work, but even commercially "Blackwater Park" marked a major turning point in the band's career, considerably widening their audience: it's one of the hallmarks of masterpieces, winning over even the least receptive hearts (and eardrums), breaking down stylistic and aesthetic boundaries.

After "Blackwater Park", nothing was the same again for Opeth. While "Deliverance" (2002) belongs to the same stylistic vision, closing out an ideal trilogy of works, the albums that followed explored the more prog-rock, intimate side of the band with ever-growing conviction. For prog-metal, and for progressive death metal too, a great deal has changed since 2001, moving toward a synthesis of extremity and technique, compositional grandeur and emotional impact that now makes a track from the turn of the millennium sound like a classic. It's a highly dynamic evolutionary process, Opeth's as much as metal's in general, one that finds in "Blackwater Park" a central, unrepeatable chapter.

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14/03/2021