STILL LIFE

Opeth's Still Life opens with one of the band's best tracks - the progressive death metal epic The Moor - but it soon loses its way as the band find themselves unable to focus their musical experiments into a cohesive and rich sound. Whilst Mikael Åkerfeldt is indeed mighty, his clean vocals are much less interesting, and the clean backing vocals that turn up at points verge on the cheesy. The flow of the album is disrupted horribly by the overlong and overproduced acoustic ballad Benighted - which might have been a decent enough interlude if its running time had been trimmed back and the simple acoustic guitar of it first stages hadn't been drowned under studio effects.

After that, the album's momentum is lost, and to be honest a lot of the death metal segments in its second half seem rather average for the genre. It's an OK listen, but I feel it's rather overrated.