DELIVERANCE

The swedish death-metal band Opeth is a band that it's very hard to miss, and it's recommended for any music fan. I can only say it's worth the adaptation, and worth expanding the limits of the musical taste to explore this wonderful music. The best way to meet Opeth is by the first, smooth & perfect album - "Damnation". Personally, I also began from this spot and gone, step by step, to hear another material by the band, which mixes very acoustic & melodic songs, along with hard & aggressive ones. The rest of the albums are mainly a good combination between Death, Doom & Prog Metal, but that doesn't mean a thing because Opeth is much more than that, and like other great musical milestones (such as Pink Floyd), it invents her new unique genre.

"Deliverance" was released in November 2002, it's their 6th, it includes 6 tracks (ironic?...), unless you mention the little instrumental track - "For Absent Friends". Besides the last one, all of the album tracks can easily break th 10 minutes limit, which definitely proves that in order to listen to the band, you got to have high attention & concentration qualities, because the songs are pretty complexed in this album, in the aspect of production & structure, but not the same as bands like Dream Theater or other prog metal bands. Opeth is focused less on long solos on different time signatures or un-invented scales, but more on the sound, the atmosphere and the transformation of feelings. In "Deliverance", like on the previous album - "Blackwater Park" - the work of Steven Wilson is felt (sorry for mentioning this name again... i swear i won't do it...), who without a doubt brought with him a fantastic vocal harmony building, and also participate as a player in some of the songs.

The jewel on the crown, is on track no. 3, "A Fair Judgement" - as much as Opeth is famous for their noise, I find their greatest power in the acoustic songs & ballads. This is just a pure 10:23 of total beauty. It begans on a gentle piano, and continues with an excellent dynamic between soft verses & powerful chorus, follows by a sad & exciting classic guitar part, a part when we find depressive & charming singing by Mikael Akerfeldt, great vocals by Wilson (sorry, last time...), and a moving guitar solo, when it all falls down, starts a hard slow riff that fades down in the end of this song. Another great track that i liked is no. 5, "Master's Apprentices" - when you hear a quiet instrumental like "For Absent Friends", you can guess that the next track will be a "bomb". There's no other way to describe other than "cruel"... A killing & slow guitar riff, over-reacted use of the double-bass, scary growls & traghic lyrics all combined to the heaviest track in the album (along with "Deliverance"). But what could have finish after 4 minutes as a superb track by a regular doom band, is still moving along - in the "Opeth"ic tradition, to much more heights with a drown in the cruelness level, to touching melodies, clean singing and vocals that create pleasent harmonies & instrumental parts...

"Deliverance" is a release that Opeth are fully after it. It seems like Mikael & his folks were focused on their way of how they want to do it - and the result is the heaviest album they created. You can easily say - to sum up - that in those 3698 seconds there is no one moment to blink - 3.5 Stars.