MY ARMS, YOUR HEARSE

After the more doom-ish Morningrise, Opeth's third album is the full-fledged demonstration of the style that made them famous - mix of aggressive death metal parts with growling, double kicks and dissonance with slow acoustic passages sometimes linked by more melodic metallic intros and transitions. But it's a style that needs refining. On My Arms, the different parts still sound disconnected, not as seamlessly integrated as in Blackwater Park, say, with death parts sounding the same and tough to listen to, while acoustic ones are often simplistic and not coalescing into a melody. Little use of other stylistic devices that will slowly creep into Opeth later on (if you discount the completely out of place sounding Pink Floydian outro Epilogue). And we have the death growls. A rarely valid device, in my opinion, unless you want to scare your parents or do a Faust-and-Mephistopheles concept (and you only can do it once). On an album about a ghost love story they sound especially off-putting.