Year Of Metal #008: Opeth - Blackwater Park
We’re back to Sweden and back to the proggy stuff with Opeth’s 2001 album and perhaps the finest collection I’ve heard yet. This is more or less what the Dream Theater album would have been like in an ideal world. It’s complex and sprawling, with only one short instrumental tune coming in under five minutes, but there’s nothing wasted here at all, combining beauty and darkness even more impressively than Deafheaven (and certainly no songs that sound like Gaz Barlow wrote them).
It’s that dichotomy that really sets Blackwater Park apart. Centrepiece “The Drapery Falls” may be the best example. There can’t be too many metal songs that grow and transition this much - and this smoothly. We initially get swinging, anthemic, arena-ready rock, with Mikael Åkerfeldt’s clean vocals keeping things on the level. At the halfway mark, everything becomes gnarled and punchy, death growls and far harsher guitars. The riffs become frantic and discordant, the drums pulverising - it’s proper descent into madness stuff. The result is sinister but almost natural-sounding - it could have been dug up from aeons ago, heard floating across the mist in some haunted woods.
Blackwater Park is among the best produced and best sounding records I’ve heard of late. Production is handled by the band and Steven Wilson from Porcupine Tree, and between them they conjure so much space and texture in a genre that’s often dismissed as being about pure volume. It’s not just in the more obvious dynamic shifts, the clean acoustic passages - a song like “Bleak” sees the band at their most aggressive, but all the layers are in place, the piled up guitars, the remarkably melodic bass (this is great throughout the record - I’m pretty sure Martín Méndez is playing a double bass at points on “The Leper Affinity”). The music’s massive and all engulfing without being overstuffed or muddy.
I’ve said before that I’m not always too keen on the vocal techniques of some strands of metal, but I think the guttural growling and screaming doesn’t just work on Blackwater Park, it’s essential. There’s such a sense of folkloric drama across this album. It does sound 2001 in a sense when Åkerfeldt sings clean, but a lot of the music sounds completely out of time, and the bestial vocals add so much to that almost Brothers Grimm vibe. The music doesn’t sound like it was written so much as summoned.
It’s certainly not the kind of gear you can necessarily dip in and out of; listened to as a piece, though, it really holds weight. My understanding is the band gradually tones down the metal aspects (or the death metal, at any rate) for a purer prog sound, which I’m not sure I’d be quite so keen on. The bucolic horror of Blackwater Park is too perfect a balance.
