52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #8

Nevermore – Dead Heart in a Dead World

(Century Media, 2000)

Buy the album here

In December of 2017 Nevemore’s former vocalist Warrel Dane died of a heart attack.  The band had split following The Obsidian Conspiracy, and Dane was recording his second solo album when he passed away.  While his problems with alcohol contributed to Nevermore’s split and ultimately his death, Dane's talent for dramatic, histrionically wild heavy metal vocals helped set his band apart from their contemporaries.  One of the few American acts to successfully adopt a more modern European style of heavy metal, Nevermore balanced crushing heaviness with mature melodies, and politicised ruminations on our technological world with Gothic fantasy.  Taken from the word repeated by the titular bird in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, the band’s name seems fitting given their and the author’s American reworking of Gothic and horror traditions more commonly associated with Britain and Europe.  Dane’s theatrical style, lurching from soulful baritone crooning to high-pitched shrieks to sharp-edged, aggressive modern metal vocals, provides the album with a mid-Atlantic feel that somehow avoids compromise. 

Like Opeth at their peak, Dead Heart in a Dead World combines distinct styles while maintaining focus and direction.  Jeff Loomis’ guitar sound has a depth and versatility that is also reminiscent of Opeth, while Van Williams' punishing percussion reminds me of Vader but with the feel to deal with Nevermore’s more ballad-like tracks.  This balance of styles has the album on a knife edge of hysterical emotion and technical chicanery.  The joy of listening to Nevermore is the feeling you will fall from that edge at any moment, only to be pulled back by the perfect musical balance or an expertly timed shift in tone.  Take their nearly unrecognisable cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” as an example: tight, heavy riffing and incessant snare strikes create an oppressive atmosphere that runs the risk of overpowering the wonderful lyrics of the original, but Dane’s ability to tell the story with loud “whispers” and proud, full-bodied melodies levels the scale.  Recorded at a time when metal bands were covering all sorts of popular songs, Nevermore’s effort stands out as a benchmark for all others to heed before trying their own.  But it is in their own compositions where they truly excel, producing hard-edged, technical, yet poetic heavy metal that conjures thoughts of Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, and most notably Queensrӱche.

In album closer “Dead Heart in a Dead World” we find Queensrӱche’s sense of drama but with an extreme metal edge that punches the emotions home and leaves the listener reeling.  In “The Heart Collector” we find the same earnest self-reflection and near melodrama.  Dominated by Dane’s plaintive cries and melodic crooning, Loomis takes a back seat here and Jim Sheppard’s rich bass sound becomes the foundation on which the ballad is built.  With that said, there are beautiful lead guitar details everywhere you turn in “The Heart Collector” and a heavy closing section that subtly blends the track with its surroundings.  Nevermore are often far more direct, evidenced by opening track “Narcosynthesis” and its furious expression of facing repressed memories.  With military precision Loomis, Williams, and Sheppard drill holes in your skull, which Dane then fills with fear-driven emotional drama.  It feels like Loomis’ guitar might break in two under the pressure, while Williams’ drums are steel kegs shattering your teeth with their exacting harshness.  “Inside Four Walls” opens with a more rounded bass-driven sound, but quickly pares back to a vicious Loomis verse riff perfectly setting up the expansiveness of the chorus.  Loomis’ bridge passages and solos are startling, as if he’s treating the song as a Youtube guitar exhibition while somehow retaining focus on the song’s tight 4-minute structure.  Even when Loomis and Williams show off it always feels as though it’s in service of the song.  “Engines of Hate” might be the perfect example of this: it seems to twist and turn with aggression and speed, displays incredible musicianship, and never once loses sight of its purpose.  It’s furiously heavy, technically complex, but structurally tight and unadorned: the sound of a perfectly focused heavy metal band.

However, the album’s peak appears when Nevermore bring together fantasy, spirituality, and humanity’s dangerous attempts to dominate nature through technology.  “The River Dragon Has Come” seamlessly blends these tropes into a seething and somehow featherlight heavy metal onslaught.  It’s here that Loomis' perfectly distorted guitar sound is able to lift its listeners to the greatest heights: phenomenal riffing, displays of patience and timing, ear-melting leads, and a songwriter’s willingness to let everyone else shine.  Complemented by Williams' bionic limbs, Sheppard’s huge bass foundation, and Dane’s inspired, emotive storytelling, “The River Dragon Has Come” is one of the most re-listenable songs I’ve ever encountered.  In fact, this is one of the most re-listenable records I’ve ever heard and is among the best heavy metal albums of the millennium it helped to mark.  Incorporating traditional metal sounds with focused songwriting and modern metal production quality, Nevermore, along with Opeth and Strapping Young Lad, set a standard for modern metal bands that was proud to look back but far more excited to push forward.  Dead Heart in a Dead World is ironically an uplifting and inspirational emotional journey.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #37

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.