STILL LIFE

Opeth has a lot of great music, but Still Life is the one album where it all came together the most. It combines their mellow and beautiful passages with their bone-crushing metal stylings in a tremendous way, and their songwriting, song by song, from start to finish, has never been better. Every song on here is absolutely aces, and the sound and production is off the charts good: it's not as raw as their earlier material, but not too refined as to restrict their heaviness. Not that the newer stuff does that per se, but the material on this record is still a little raw and rough, and it needed that bit of edginess in sound for the full effect to be gotten, and it just works.

Opeth has many albums I would call essential - pretty much every album from this one through Watershed - but this is their overall best. Albums like Blackwater Park, Ghost Reveries and Deliverance arguably have slightly higher highs, but the least best songs on those records, while still good, really stand out. With Still Life, trying to rank the songs from best to worst would be next to impossible; every song is that good, and the quality is that consistent throughout.