BLACKWATER PARK

First thing that I'm saying is that these growls sound ridiculous from the very first seconds, I despise them. The record would be much better if it had better melody building on the vocals. However if the album is highly important and influential within it's genre, I will ignore the vocals and give the album a higher rating. This album is the case. The biggest influence in this album comes from an actually-essential record "Crimson" by Edge Of Sanity. I don't listen to that album much but it influenced many melodic death metal bands we have today, one of them is of course Opeth.

Saying that this album is influential to music is a good statement, since Opeth made two records before that were very similar, but not with the same level of mastery as this one, in other words this album recycles the same thing Opeth had been doing before but better.

There's some enjoyable tracks for sure, Harvest is my favorite probably because it doesn't have those awful growls and I enjoy listening to the first half of The Drapery Falls because of its atmosphere, Patterns In The Ivy is a sweet instrumental too. I don't care about the rest not because it's necessarily bad but because of the repeated use of growls without any interesting instrumentation.

It doesn't matter if an album has many growls to me, as long as it influenced the genre and therefore should be considered essential. And like I said in the beginning, this is the case. If you like growls you'll definitely enjoy this record much more and you should go check it out (which is why it has a high rating after all!).

Five Stars.