Opeth – Deliverance
(Music For
Nations, 2001)
Buy the album
here
Opeth
existed at the crossroads between death metal, folk music, prog, and pure evil.*
It is easy to imagine Mikael Åkerfeldt, primary songwriter for Opeth and
amusing bloke, standing at such a crossroads and signing a contract with the
devil to assign him unmatched talents in this field. The crossroads would have been isolated in a
barren landscape, the sole tree, grand yet lifeless, hanging over the road as
if waiting to hang a victim. As the grey
clouds closed in, masking any remaining light, the devil would have approached
to whisper hell in your ear.
That’s
what listening to Opeth is like: gothic horror in which the lightness of touch
only intensifies the darkness of the subject matter. This is true for all of Opeth’s truly great
albums, My Arms, Your Hearse (1998), Still Life (1999), Blackwater Park (2001), and Deliverance. This was the Opeth album that found me first,
and opened my mind to the possibility of brutally heavy death metal that soothes
with acoustic guitar, wandering passages of musical exploration, and satanic
lullabies. Ironically, this is Opeth’s
heaviest album, and deliberately so, with Damnation
being released as a companion album only months after Deliverance to fully explore the “clean” side of Opeth’s music, and
further cement Åkerfeldt’s relationship with Pavement maestro, Steve Wilson. Approaching the Deliverance/Damnation project as a double album allowed Opeth the
freedom to intensify and even exaggerate their characteristics on each record,
and produce two distilled versions of what the band had become. Deliverance
is concentrated evil.
You
can feel the intent on first track, “Wreath”, with its scarily abrasive sound
and pitch-black death growl. There is no
warning here. “Wreath” lurches out with
razor sharp guitars and Lopez’s incredible drumming, precisely balancing double
bass speed with restrained snare and cymbal use, and propels the listener into
the black hail that is Mikael
Åkerfeldt’s
vocal: “Falling inside again / The nightmare always the same”. The title track rides in on building waves of
guitar punctuated by that solid snare, only to give way to a riff that would
have long hair in metal venues worldwide spinning in unison supported by Lopez’s
sustained and perfectly produced double bass pedal sound. “Deliverance” gives the listener little
glimpses of respite with a softer overall guitar sound than “Wreath”,
experimental passages, gently delivered melodic vocals, and thoughtful lead
guitar colour. Coming in at over 13
minutes, alternating dark and light, Åkerfeldt’s repeated demonic delivery of the
line “all over now”, the subtle use of keys, and ending on the album’s
signature, and seemingly never-ending, drum beat, this song is the definition
of prog death.
The
punishing tension that is built during this epic is dispersed by the softness
of the album’s second act. In “A Fair
Judgement” and “For Absent Friends” we learn that even when writing a
purposefully heavy album Opeth are unafraid to take their listeners on long,
melodic journeys. Åkerfeldt’s forlorn
tone on the former is beautiful, enhanced by delicate rhyming couplets, and
allows the lengthy traded solos to stand out fully, while in the latter Opeth
simply let the gentle tones of the guitars do the talking. It’s the last moment of objective beauty that
this album will offer you.
The
opening of “Master’s Apprentice” does away with the complexity, the play of
light and dark, the beauty, and opts for a giant metal riff and punishing
vocals. It’s an explosive moment on the
album that will break your neck and your larynx. Even the meandering and expressive bridge
section later in the song is rudely interrupted by that unmistakable growl and
provides only minor reprieve during the closing act. In the album closer “By the Pain I See in
Others” the quiet moments seem intent on simply making the heavier sounds more
punishing, every moment of relaxation more and more brief, every false end to
the song both difficult to endure and invigorating, like scaling gruelling, false
peaks on a Scottish mountain but be provided with an ever more stunning view
with each one. Despite both songs in
this final act exceeding 10 minutes, and incorporating multiple approaches to
music and wide-ranging instrumentation, they comprise the most direct work
Opeth had produced since “Demon of the Fall” and are a fitting finale to their
heaviest album.
Opeth’s
heaviness sounds natural, as if it had walked out of Scandinavian forests in to
your ears, and blends seamlessly with their progressive, gothic, and folk
elements. It is important to acknowledge,
however, that it is not natural, and that Åkerfeldt’s stellar songwriting,
lyrical imagination, and awareness of tone make this blend work. He is decidedly unnatural. Other bands have tried to do what Opeth do,
but none have managed to so perfectly occupy all these spaces at once without
ever seeming out of place or forced. It
seems to me that Åkerfeldt’s contract with the devil worked out well. Damnation may await his soul, but at least we’ll
always have Deliverance.
*They
still exist, it’s just they’re pretty much 70s prog now.
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