GHOST REVERIES

I could never understand all the hype about classic extreme metal albums like the ones of Atheist or, for that matter, Still Life by the band in our focus. They may have been innovative, but let's face it: the production, by modern standards, completely sucks. This does matter a great deal as the upshot is that they sound quite bad. What's more, it seems to have taken humanity a little time to learn to produce deep, devilish growls that would make the extreme side of extreme prog work as it is supposed.

Ghost Reveries is probably the first example of what I can consider a success in such an endeavor. With their clean sections, Opeth already were highly accomplished painters of all kinds of grey melancholic sceneries, Damnation providing the most batch of examples. But it was not until Reveries that Opeth became heavy. Not noisy, not dirty, not irritating. Heavy. It strikes the listener with sheer heaviness from the very beginning and does not let them go until the very end, providing short reprieves only to shock them again with yet another wave of extreme aggression and brutality. The balance is struck masterfully; heaviness of extreme metal tends to wear out quite rapidly as one listens to it, which Opeth wisely account for with clean vocals, acoustic and jazzy sections, and ambient keys. But notwithstanding their excellence, what really begs for praise is the execution of the metal part of the plan. The first verses of The Mire exemplify the best growls I ever heard, and the solo at the end is as good as a metal solo can get (incidentally, the riff before the first vocals is one of the best riffs I've heard). Somehow Michael's roaring is both unbelievably demonic and extremely catchy; you can almost dance to it! Check out rap-like extreme vocals (after that sick UUUUUUGHHHH) in Harlequin Forest, or the first verses of The Baying of the Hounds, for instance. By and large, such metal proficiency allows for the play of contrasts of unprecedented efficiency, which makes Grost Reveries stand out even many years after.

That said, the album is not perfect. In some songs (Harlequin Forest, The Grand Conjuration) it gets too repetitive. In some others it might get a bit boring. However, I care for the amount of greatness in a release, not its concentration. And thus I wholeheartedly rate it with 5 stars. The band will continue the trend with Watershed, but it is this album that has first seen them fully harnessing their progtreme talent.

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