BLACKWATER PARK

'Blackwater Park' is the fifth studio album of Opeth and was released in 2001. The album marks the first musical collaboration between the Porcupine Tree front man Steven Wilson and Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth. Wilson had been brought in to produce 'Blackwater Park', which led to a considerable shift in Opeth's musical style and many musical influences in the future music of Porcupine Tree. And this was only the beginning of the collaboration between both.

The line up on the album is Mikael Akerfeldt (vocals, guitar and acoustic guitar), Peter Lindgren (guitar), Martin Mendez (bass guitar) and Martin Lopez (drums). The album has also the collaboration of Steven Wilson (clean and backing vocals, keyboards, mellotron and guitar).

'Blackwater Park' has eight tracks. All songs were written and composed by Mikael Akerfeldt except 'Dirge For November' and 'Blackwater Park' written and composed by Akerfeldt and Lindgren. The first track 'The Leper Affinity' is a crashing song with some very heavy riffs, great growled vocals and then suddenly the song changes to a soft song. The way this song flows from the heavy to the soft is simply wonderful. This is also a perfect introduction to Mikael's vocals. He can do very low crawls, which neither lack emotion nor energy, and then he can also do some beautiful and gorgeous clean vocals. The second track 'Bleak' is a song fantastically composed, beginning with an extremely heavy musical atmosphere. The growls on this song are some of the best on the album, and the clean vocals don't slack off either. The guitar work on this song is absolutely amazing, with some power riffs. It has also truly an incredible instrumental work by the rest of the band's members. This is probably one of the best tracks the group ever made. The third track 'Harvest' is simply one of the band's most popular songs. The reason is immediately clear. It has a fantastic use of various and diverse musical dynamics to create a beautiful and one of the most perfect musical atmospheres that we can find in music. The peaceful musical atmosphere of the song gives the listener some good and nice folk melodies. The fourth track 'The Drapery Falls' begins as more of a very powerful ballad, before morphing into a very heavy, but at the same time very emotional interlude, where the growls return in a very nice form. Despite it contains some growls, and great lyrics to accompany them, it's more focused on building a mood and a real feeling of desperation. 'Harvest' and 'Drapery Falls' are the two more atmospheric songs on the album. The fifth track 'Dirge For November' starts with a mellow singing style with acoustic guitar work, followed with a beautiful guitar solo accompanied with excellent acoustic guitar fills. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the music turns louder with a distorted guitar work. The electric guitar solo takes the melody of the opening part and brings the music with the usual singing style. This is another brilliant song on the album. The sixth track 'The Funeral Portrait' opens with one of the few moments on the album worthy of head banging, contrasting simultaneously with some interesting sounding acoustic parts. This is a very heavy track, probably the heaviest, but despite it can be considered to have a very straight forward musical structure, it has some excellent transitions with great guitar work between several musical passages. The seventh track 'Patterns In The Ivy' is a very short track that explores an excellent acoustic guitar work and a nice piano work. It provides a nice break after the hard driving tracks performed previously and a kind of a merely warm up to the next and lengthiest track on the album. The eighth and last track is the title track 'Blackwater Park'. It has a musical structure relatively complex and it changes as the music flows with various singing styles. It has heavy and distorted guitar parts and as the music moves, there are some musical transitions into quieter musical passages exploring clean guitar fills accompanied with acoustic guitar. This is a track with wide variations in terms of musical styles and density.

Conclusion: 'Blackwater Park' is another excellent album from Opeth with tight compositions that explore various different sounds that can be produced from musical instruments and frequent tempo changes which sometimes occur very abruptly. The musical style of the album can be categorized under the progressive metal style with growls by Akerfeldt. For those, like me, who in generally hate growling vocals, I suggest, in the case of Opeth, that you change your usual perception from your vocals role to deliver message with vocal as a musical instrument. Compared with their previous fourth studio album 'Still Life', I'm able to say that 'Blackwater Park' is very similar to it, in terms of quality, despite being, in my opinion, a little bit heavier. As I wrote before, when I reviewed 'Still Life', I still prefer 'Still Life' to 'Blackwater Park'. But, sincerely I like very much of both albums. They are, in my humble opinion, two great masterpieces and two of the best prog albums ever made. However, I still think that 'Still Life' is a more balanced album between the heavy and the soft melodic musical parts. By the other hand, I simply love the concept of 'Still Life'.

Prog is my Ferrari. Jem Godfrey (Frost*)

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