Editor's note: what is about to follow over the next few weeks/months, is a retrospective on one of metal's most influential bands of all time, Opeth. We commissioned it from one of our favorite writers in metal journalism and writing today and good friend of the blog, Langdon Hickman.
We gave them zero direction, instead preferring to set free their unique, perceptive, and passionate style as very few publications have before. What resulted is part album review, part memoir, and part philosophical text on why music matters. We love it to bits; we hope you do too.
This is the last interjection from us. The text is very lightly edited and unabridged. Once it's done, we will publish it all as one piece.
You can find all parts of it here.
Enjoy. Long live Opeth. Hail death metal!
This is a story of transformation. Of stone torn from earth, dusty and shaded, emerging from the deeper shade of the crooked crags of Ourea’s exposed mouths and, by heat and temper, the iron that can be called from it to turn at least into brilliant filigree and decoration. Many venues bypass the question of remastering in the critical process; we see, whether foregrounded or obscured in deep shadow, a foolish notion in criticism that places the composition before all other considerations. This is, in the world of music, the equivalent of a literary critical movement called New Criticism, a branch of literary studies that emerged in the wake of a 1941 text titled, fittingly, The New Criticism. The initial impetus of New Criticism was, especially when constrained to the field of poetry, one of wielding close reading techniques to view a written work as a self-referential aesthetic work, “the text itself”, stripped of external referents so as to mostly tightly concentrate its development of image and syntax and form.
The inherent issues with this methodology, however, become apparent to any deconstructionist eye: language itself, when not generated ab nihilo within a text, is itself a perpetual external referent, as such is every term not defined within the confines of the text. The only text that fully satisfies the New Critical methodology as written, it turns out, is functionally a set theoretical work, a literary equivalent to the works of Whitehead and Russell’s crowning redefining of mathematics. We know, however, the sad and frustrating tale in the world of mathematics regarding any set theoretical approach taken by its lonesome. The machine decomposes itself. The inherent limitation of even the limitless appears, in the manner of Gödel, the breakages of continuums and axioms of choice emerge, forcing is produced, and inevitably we must admit all mathematics are built upon a perpetual web of contingency, contextualization, and a haunting ephemeral meta-mathematical aura that encompasses any attempted or constructed mathematics.
So too in the world of literature. Texts, as it turns out, are not islands in and of themselves, are not divorced from histories or lineages or psyches, either generative or witnessing psyches, and are themselves likewise beholden to all forms of inherent or constructed networks that elucidate new and divergent meaning over time. So alas must music likewise be. There is no “composition itself”, at least accessible to the human; the dream of the song is different from its written form, which differs in the minds and eyes or all witnesses, and, in this case, even a canonical recorded form can find itself radically expanded in scope, vision and clarity such that it is akin to rebuilding a moldering manor into a resplendent and vertiginous manse. They may share walls, foundation, and gardens, but the buildings are ultimately not the same.
In the youthful air in which I discovered Opeth with my dear friend, surprisingly little brought us to Morningrise. Little, of course, save “Black Rose Immortal”, a song which still reigns as their sole piece exceeding 20 minutes. It was still a few years before I discovered what progressive music even was, blindly gravitating toward it without having the language to express what I desired, but even then I knew how to see a gargantuan track length and salivate. I’d been raised by a father who was entrenched in acid rock and fusion, being born in 1950 and being a musician himself, among the many identities my father possessed in his brief life. I had been trained since boyhood to appreciate albums as long-form compositional vehicles, to sit with rapt awe and patience as half-hour suites by groups like Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin unfurled, charting the vastness of their interior universes, while deeper cuts from groups like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Egg and Procul Harem whet my appetite for the wilder fringes of where heavy rock could go.
This, combined with the same generalized ambitiousness in youthful air that suffuses most, meant that the daunting task of facing down a 20-minute piece of music, an act that cowed most of my friends at the time (give them a break, they were 11 to 13 and predominantly into punk), suddenly became a Herculean task to overcome, a means to mark myself as mightier than those that surrounded me. This notion was, sadly, foremost at my mind in those days, when my threadbare self-esteem in the throes of an abusive home mixed with the fraught psyche of youth in puberty left me desperate for some means to prove myself above but only insomuch as it might hopefully prove me worthy.
To say I struggled would be an understatement. I likely then would have told you that my flabbergasted look was one of sheer awe, wowed by the mastery of both the compositional and technical acumen of these musicians, so able to weave such a monumental piece of music which felt more like a sweeping epic poem, flowers of evil and rotten livers laid upon marble tombs, something like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the gothic poets I was getting into at the time. In truth, though, half of the great feat of getting through the song was one of parsing what the fuck was even going on. It was, to be kind, coated in a kind of low-fidelity hiss and sonic turbulence, owing equally to the rough recording situation that band had at the time, the muddy and unclear mix it received and, ahem, the artifacting of some speciously legal mp3s.
Any time the guitars or drums would lock into steady streams of sixteenth notes, it would all turn to mud, with my ear following more by sentiment than clear and deliberate awareness of the notes being played. This in turn had a strange effect: the moments of clarity, of which there were many, with the chime-like acoustic guitars and occasional foregrounded vocal melody, swam up like fish in black water. There was a strange grandeur to it. It was admittedly far muddier than the material of theirs that had initially caught my ear, both from Orchid and My Arms, Your Hearse, not to mention comically unsophisticated compared to what would come on Still Life and Blackwater Park. But the unabashed ambition of the piece grabbed me then the way that Caress of Steel by Rush grabs me now; a deeply flawed enterprise, a band flying far too close to the sun too soon, but all the more thrilling for it.
I was not precisely a trained ear then. I tried, certainly; a funny artifact of my autism is that my tendency to squirrel myself away with liner notes and stacks of records and heaps of attendant reading has been a lifelong pursuit, a means of enrobing myself in the twilight star-spackled flesh of the wizard, art. However, criticism is a task that takes a lifetime to learn, and even then only ever poorly, while appreciation of art comes more like lightning from god rather than something we precisely summon. Still, it seemed obvious to me then, as it does now, that we would not have received the Opeth that we have all come to treasure if not for this startling act of ambition on their part.
The failure of the piece is a thrilling one, like watching a great cathedral collapsing under the weight of the embroidered cloth and the overwhelming, nearly suffocating, crush of moldings and plaster decorations choking every surface, be it floor, ceiling or wall. The band heaves between progressive folk, pulling from the wheelhouse of Jethro Tull, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention and the like, while melding it haphazardly against a proto-NWOBHM sense of heavy metal, the kind of heroics that US power metal and the current trad metal revival would pull from.
Black metal and death metal emerge only in the sense that Tales from the Thousand Lakes by Amorphis and the early works of Sentenced link with extreme metal, coming from far more a melodic and folk metal orientation. There is something charming in how movements within the song will evolve suddenly from simple single-note melodies that sound like a beginner's tentative and anxious plucking to the rich oaken fullness that Opeth has possessed in acoustic work since their debut. It sounded, then and now, less like a song and more like the entire history of a band scrambled and rearranged, pieces appended to one another haphazardly, without care for logic or orientation.
It turns out this is more or less correct. The roots of the song, a demo piece entitled "Whispers of Golgotha", had been in production by the band since at least 1992, when the first recording of the piece, already well over 10 minutes long, had been made. Sources for its demo place it as roughly composed at the same time as the rest of Orchid, minus the few shorter pieces which wound up on that finished record. There's been no definitive statement as to why it was not featured on their debut, given circulating demos from that period show it as more or less in the same state as what emerged on Morningrise.
One could make comfortable guesses, however: Orchid, already over an hour long, likely couldn't handle an extra 20 minutes tacked on without something being lost in the process, nor would it have been especially attractive as a debut. However, statements about whether it was even considered for Orchid are hard to come by and, when found, tend to just refer to it as another of the admittedly small handful of songs they'd penned that did not show up on the record, including demos such as "Eternal Soul Torture" and "Into the Frost of Winter" which were made primarily of riffs that would later appear elsewhere. It is fun, however, to surmise intentions of a double-record that were scuttled at some point, if only because of the closeness it would bring the band to Dream Theater, a band whom their early days are shockingly tied to.
It was only years later, of course, after the esteem of the band had been firmly established and their legacy as one of the greatest progressive metal bands of all time was secured, that Akerfeldt opened up about how much of a fan of Dream Theater he was. By his own reckoning, he became a fan around 1992 with the release of Images and Words after seeing "Pull Me Under" on television during the inexplicable window of mainstream attention paid to Dream Theater. He likened the single, as many have, as a combination of Metallica and Yes, proof positive that his desires to meld the progressive rock and heavy metal worlds he was interested in were viable. We underestimate in modernity how big Dream Theater's emergence was. Prog and heavy metal had never really been fully separated, obviously, as the long arc of especially the more inventive wings of technical thrash and the avant-garde of the 80s and early 90s showed, not to mention how NWOBHM and its direct ilk had refused to shed the charming "caveman prog" sentiment that propelled its most epic and starry-eyed material.
But the face of black and death metal, especially of that era, largely disavowed such things, admittedly in the same sham way that the first wave of punk decried the grandiloquence of rock at the time only to, a few short years later, nearly all turn and make arthouse projects themselves. But as much as Images and Words proved a seachange in the 90s, generating an unbelievably vast wave of progressive metal and rock bands much in the same way Mastodon's emergence roughly a decade later would likewise do, it was Awake, their 1994 album, that would penetrate deepest into the extreme metal world. Before public opinion in the world of heavy metal deemed Dream Theater dork shit, a sentence they still struggle under to some extent, the underground metal world was actually quite taken by them, with a cosign from none other than Chuck Schuldiner regarding the musical worth of Awake and its name appearing in a number of underground metal magazines at the time as a toothsome and worthwhile record. Given Akerfeldt's stated interest in the band and its release around the same time as Orchid, plus Opeth's own deep wandering from the Ludditic and brutal death metal of their earliest pre-Akerfeldt incarnation, its hard not to see at least some connection.
But, to me at least, the most interesting connection here relates to an anecdote regarding the creation of Images and Words and how it correlates to my supposed alternate double-album version of Orchid, that being the curious fate of "A Change of Seasons". Like "Black Rose Immortal", it too was penned well before its recorded debut, having been written in the same period as the bulk of Images and Words in the period where they had only intermittent but largely no vocalist at all. Initial live bootlegs place "A Change of Seasons" at just under 20 minutes and with sections that would later be removed and apportioned to other material; the final version would clock in at roughly 25-minutes and only be released after the recording of Awake in the middle of 1995. It is a fun game to play, imagining Akerfeldt pressing play on the finished version of Dream Theater's first (and, depending on how I feel at the time, still their best) 20+ minute epic and going, shit, we got to dust ours off.
In the case of Dream Theater, the original intent of releasing it as the album closer for Images and Words was scuttled because it would have made their debut a double record, something that was deemed commercial suicide. Ironically enough, this process would repeat, with their next record Falling Into Infinity having its own initial double-album arrangement axed by the label, causing them to scrap another planned 20+ minute epic titled "Metropolis Part 2", which would of course inevitably be retooled to become a concept album in its own right.
The delicious irony does not end there! Because this arc, the planned double album (in the case of Opeth, my own speculative supposing rather than a factual statement, while in the case of Dream Theater an often-verified fact) that causes the deferment of a 20-minute epic that eventually becomes the basis of a concept record itself too recurs. In the case of Opeth, one must look at the textual body of "Black Rose Immortal", that being the tale of a lover turning to the devil for a means of returning to him the one he has lost. This bears a striking resemblance, albeit with some minor tweaks, to the narrative of My Arms, Your Hearse, their following record, which would follow its inverse. The spirit of the dead man returns from the pit of death to visit his beloved only to see that she's moved on without him.
This also echoes in the narrative of Still Life, which chronicles two lovers within a puritanical culture where the woman is killed by a priest on suspicions of witchcraft, obscuring his own dark lust in a Hawthornian twist, causing the man to turn his spirit over to the devil to get his vengeance, becoming a mad killer who is only laid low after killing many himself. These narratives are admittedly non-identical, and Akerfeldt's writing style has always tended toward the more gothic and austere making their commonalities a bit easier to compensate for, but the final dash of the delayed release of their 20-minute epic spawning the firmament that future masterworks and concept albums mirroring Dream Theater once more was too fun and, frankly, funny to pass up.
For years, "Black Rose Immortal" cast a long shadow over the rest of the record for me, the depths of which were hard to penetrate. Its placement in the track listing made this apparent, coming fourth of five tracks, feeling in a certain manner like all the record prior was a warmup to prepare you for this single great piece of music with a single track to cool you down afterward. This sentiment in my mind felt so firm and true that, in my youth, I never even sought to double-check it by hearing the rest of the rest. It was only a few years later that I finally heard it in its entirety, handed a burned copy by my friend Josh, who I'd helped get into extreme metal in return for him helping get me deeper into punk. We both became ardent fans of the site Black Metal Radio, which started operating in 2000 doing internet radio broadcasts of hour+ long stretches of black metal material.
It was there that we both first heard Emperor, who sounded so rich and majestic compared to their peers, as well as Marduk and Mayhem, who were far more bestial, Windir and Enslaved, who had a rich and almost frighteningly intense Nordic atmosphere, as well as the true greatest of the genre in Bathory, who seemingly effortlessly summoned up every element that made the genre worthwhile in the depths of his own youth. It was only years later that, as we matured politically as well as emotionally, we began to wrestle with the rough task any extreme metal fan faces, that being the specter of things such as fascism, homophobic violence and reactionary impulse buried within this material we love. But at the time, in our ignorance, we were blissfully enthralled as only children can be in the sheer shock and splendor of the material. It was from this that I showed Josh Opeth, who by this point had just released Damnation and Deliverence; only a few weeks later, he said he'd already downloaded their entire body of work and, as thanks, handed me burned CDs of a few I mentioned I hadn't heard yet, Morningrise among them.
Imagine my great shock, then, when I press play for the first time on that record and hear the remaining four tracks. The time spent on Black Metal Radio, which married the natural hiss of raw black metal to the artificial hiss of early mpeg2 (before the debut of mp3 as a file format) and internet streaming capacity, had honed my ear for black metal, which is another way of saying I was comfortable with almost unlistenable amounts of barely legible noise, which is sadly much of what I was greeted with. It is not, of course, that the initial mixes of Morningrise were utterly illegible. The album has had its fans since its release, routinely ranking right there with Still Life for a specific contingent of fans interested in Opeth as a gothic and fastidiously crenulated band as the group's greatest record. And while a great number of those fans are themselves enmeshed more within the world of black metal than that of progressive or death metal, the other two strongest branches of the band's identity by this point, it is not to say that album itself should necessarily be placed in those same brackets.
However, the adverse mixing of its initial releases (and even to an extent the 2000s-era CD verion) plus the strength of its fanbase within a predominantly black metal space is perhaps most keenly why this era of the band is often perceived as substantially more black metal than it really is, with the complex and delicate riffing shown here read read as the spidery dreamlike riffs of the muddiest and nastiest of lo-fi raw black metal's waters.
And so then imagine my great surprise when, in preparing for this book-length project, spying the Abbey Road remasters for Opeth's first three records having just been released, I pressed play to double-check my long-held views regarding this beloved record of mine (because, make no mistake, I adored the murk and mystery of this record, fixated on its opaque and evasive beauty, would spend hours writing what I thought the lyrics might have been before inevitably unspooling to my own gothic free verse, entranced by its ghostlike whispers) only to find a spellbindingly rich and ornate progressive rock record that is largely sparing of its metal elements and refined to such beautiful degree.
These are the songs I remember; the old days of tapping out these drum parts on my lap, on my desk at school, on the various kits of my childhood and the practice rooms I played in, not to mention the fruitless periods attempting to learn them on guitar, all came back in a hurry. But the way this remaster sounds feels more like hearing a version of the record from an alternate timeline, one where their looming legacy as a progressive metal all-time great was already apparent to the engineers and producers on hand. Some of these pieces sound so much better I struggle to believe, sincerely, that they are in fact the same takes and not somehow surreptitiously rerecorded, an event I know did not occur and yet, to my ears, simply must have. These pieces have been transformed utterly. Before, the rabid fandom of Morningrise made sense largely as a historical note, being first the record where Opeth made clear to the world that they were not going to play ball with preconceptions of what extreme or even progressive metal could or had to be and second being, until now, still their most mysterious and evasive record. Now, I can hear the logic in the sentiment far more viscerally.
The sound on the record is much more medieval, conjuring images now not of rotting castles but instead of something more properly vampiric: the grandiloquence of lace and pale faces dotted with black felt pasted to their skin to hide the scars of pox, a patience and grandeur shown in how, ever as always, the band errs away from things like blast beats and traditional extreme metal structures. Opeth had used acoustic passages on Orchid but here they are expanded dramatically, often taking up large swaths of functionally every song. The more time I spend with this record the more the metallic passages almost seem to melt away, being a kind promontory with which Opeth prepares to stage their more complex acoustic drive progressive rock, feeling often like a hybrid of Änglagård and Jethro Tull in their lushness and sentiment.
The opening track, the nearly 15-minute behemoth "Advent", opens with a section that is reminiscent of a more medieval sounding Iron Maiden, as if the band had been temporarily absorbed into one of Ritchie Blackmore's post-Deep Purple groups, before pivoting three minutes in to a brief one minute progressive rock passage that reveals one of the secret weapons of this record: bassist Johan De Farfalla. The group is by and large a guitar driven group, but the work be Farfalla here on what sounds to be a fretless bass offers a similar kind of richness and liquidity that we associate now more with groups like Cynic and Atheist, with that almost jazzy rubberband-like tone with its higher treble register punching through the sheets of electric guitars and pointillistic twang of the acoustics to provide a proper counterpoint. Electric guitars return in spats, often throwing in a classic metal riff in the style of Scorpions or the like toughened up with a little extreme metal energy. But the acoustic-driven progressive rock, the almost synth-pad like usage of volume swells in electric guitars and that rich bass playing are the throughline.
It's shocking how much of this perception of the record, pivoting so drastically in my mind from far and away their most devoutly black metal release to one revealing quite early their impossibly deep fixation on progressive rock, rivaling and often eclipsing their own metallic impulses, comes just from the quality of this remaster. It reveals something fascinating: in the construction of genre, so much of what we take for great black metal comes inevitably from the same force we use to differentiate rock from pop, metal from rock: distortion. But in this case, the distortion is not of any specific instrument but of the recording itself. It is apparently that crustiness itself, the nastiness of the recording, that we associate so strongly with both black and death metal, though the precise nature of the sonic distortion we look from in either differs quite drastically (often wanting a "drier" sonic distortion for black metal and a "wetter" distortion for death metal, though this obviously is not a wholly consistent image, not to mention how often the two cross over into and borrow from one another).
This increased legibility transforming the appearance of the songs continues across the record. "Nectar", always a track I somewhat struggled with before given its placement after two involved epics and just before both the longest track of Opeth's career as well as the constantly spellbinding finale of the record in "To Bid You Farewell", has now revealed itself to be one of my favorite songs they've ever recorded. The acoustic led passage at roughly the seven minute mark, which sounds like dappled rain against bright and verdant trees, is especially beautiful to my ear. Opeth has always been a band that foregrounded beauty over brutality, always being shockingly graceful and gorgeous even in their heavier moments. The former image of the clean vocals on this record being somewhat naive and weak, a step toward the full vocal power Akerfeldt would eventually acquire, is challenged strongly by this new remaster, which provides a far more flattering image of those vocal moments, making them feel as tender as they should have been all along. The folk and almost New Age passages of "The Night and the Silent Water" and "To Bid You Farewell" have a clarion quality, feeling nearly like the material one might find on a peak record from the Windham Hill label rather than something tape traded by corpse-painted heshers.
Orchid contained much of the vision of the band but Morningrise is a strong improvement in almost every way, dialing back the metallic heft to focus on their rapidly evolved progressive songwriting acumen. It's a real work of deep beauty, struggling only really in the pacing department, with the imagination and attention straining with so many longform and complex songs back to back against each other. "To Bid You Farewell" has notoriously always struggled the most in this regard, coming after not only roughly 50 minutes of music but also after a behemoth of a song, making its otherwise relatively demure form harder to focus on properly in album context.
Thankfully, the great beauty of the track works well to snatch the mind back. Morningrise renders itself a fascinating document, made up in part by material the band had been working on as far back as 1991 during the effective reboot of the band under Akerfeldt's leadership, written largely in conjunction between him and guitarist Peter Lindgren as well as material written during and just after Orchid"s sessions. It's easy to imagine, to my ear, the band making the sharp pivot to more purely progressive rock-driven material far earlier than they wound up doing had they stayed this path, joining groups like Green Carnation, In The Woods..., Anathema and their own bedmates Katatonia in a sharper turn toward more directly prog work. Instead, a series of rapid changes began to beset the group, the kind of turbulence that can only effect a group still struggling to find its feet so to speak, with all of the members still living in cramped apartments together and having day jobs, that would, depending on your vantage point, heavily alter their trajectory following the release of this record as they arced toward what for many is their true enunciation of form in My Arms, Your Hearse.