DELIVERANCE

After Blackwater Park, Opeth decided to do what they had in mind for many years: record a double album, one with really heavy stuff and the other with only mellow songs. The result is Deliverance and Damnation... and it's good they have been released in that order. Indeed Deliverance is the most extreme music they ever recorded (with maybe My Arms Your Hearse, but even that album contained more mellow parts), and surely my least favorite from the band. Except one short instrumental, the songs are all over the 10 minute mark, which makes me say that the band tried to do a cross between the epic Morningrise and the brutal My Arms Your Hearse in this release.

"Wreath" is plain brutality, not really my taste at all. With "Deliverance", the band tried to do more classical stuff with a lot of mood changes. "A Fair Judgement" is the highlight of the album: it's not even that mellow but the band tried to do at least one song without growls, even on the heaviest parts (the end of the song for example). "For Absent Friends" is a beautiful instrumental, in the vein of "Patterns in the ivy". Then the heaviness and the brutality come back for the closing tracks "Master's Apprentices" and "By The Pain I See In Others". They contains nice passages (mellow and heavy) but they are too much diluted in the overall death metal sound.

Rating: 70/100