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!
As mentioned before, it would be a lie to pretend that My Arms, Your Hearse, Opeth's third record, represents some radical departure in their sound given what came before. With the fullness of time and the further completion of their catalog, we can comfortably look back and say with confidence that this record was in fact a thresholding experience, one that dictated in large part the direction the band would follow for the next three records after (counting Damnation and Deliverance as the double-album they were originally intended as). But while the lay historian may think only forwards across the arrow of time, revealing only sameness and continuity, and the lay dialectician may look only backwards, revealing only the assemblage which marks the differentiation of futurity from pastness, we are called in critical inquiry to do both at once, to create a new braid not of unidirectional flows of time but of simultaneity. In doing so, we find My Arms, Your Hearse as a career breaking point a much more fascinating and robust one than when typically ascribed to the more obvious elements of its difference.
An under remarked element of its shift is the time Åkerfeldt spent briefly providing lead vocals for Katatonia on the album Brave Murder Day. The sessions for this record, which occurred between the recording of Morningrise and My Arms, Your Hearse, saw Katatonia produce what would wind up being their last death-doom record. This came after they already slowly edged out extremity in their music for a more melodically consonant and mournful sound, threading the needle on the progressive elements in bands like The Cure and Siouxie and the Banshees with the more obvious progressive roots of doom metal. In a certain sense, the usage of harsh vocals on Brave Murder Day, which sat alongside the relatively new clean vocals from Jonas Renske, who would go on following this album to move from behind the drumkit to behind the microphone, might be read instead as a vestigial element. Katatonia were feeling out a shift that history tells us they took boldly and permanently on the very next record, excluding the EP Sounds of Decay which followed Brave Murder Day and was made of material cut in the same sessions.
The influence Katatonia has had on Opeth, the way the careers of both bands seem to braid about one another like a caduceus, can't be overstated. Here we see Åkerfeldt singing over, for the first time in his professionally recorded career, simpler and more direct arrangements, with riffs that may still assemble into progressive and linear songforms but are individually far more attuned to a melodic and emotional directionality of the record. That isn't to say that more internally complex riffs can't be emotionally legible but if we compare, to cite extremes, the frantic complexity of Power of Omens versus the relative directness of Cult of Luna, we can form at least a passable attempt at a continuum between cerebral and emotional songwriting. (In truth, we should likely add additional dimensions like imagism and color, viewing each of these as potentialities and not opposites, so as to better capture the true shape of music-as-art.)
Likewise, the material on Brave Murder Day is more concise than that found in spatters on Orchid and then intensified greatly on Morningrise. By concision, I do not merely mean runtimes, although those too are significantly briefer on this record than on Morningrise, a trend which would continue on to My Arms, Your Hearse and remain more or less unbroken for Opeth until the modern day. I also mean in terms of the construction of songs. There are fewer internal sections to each piece on Brave Murder Day, allowing for more repetitions of key moments and more development of interior ideas rather than the overstuffed songwriting that prog can approach at its least restrained. (Given my tastes, this is said with love.)
This kind of internal economy of form is often what transforms compelling pieces into songs, the hidden factor that helps work cross over the invisible threshold from being emotionally salient to captivating earworms. It is, granted, an alchemical balance, one that shifts genre to genre, band to band and even album to album. Some works can balloon to runtimes cresting well over the half-hour mark and remain captivating emotionally driven pieces even as their interior complexity is going haywire and other songs can run just over three minutes and still feel like a slog.
Still, this rough rubric is useful I believe in contextualizing why Morningrise, an album Opeth diehards adore and a clear favorite among certain listeners who prefer generally a more underground extreme metal approach to the songwriting and sonics of Opeth, failed in a certain sense to crest over for other fans of the band coming from either more mainstream or even more progressive wings of the musical world, despite the previously covered superb music on the record. That Åkerfeldt encountered this kind of more concretely melodically-driven material on Brave Murder Day that is also so much more keenly composed than the late 70s Rush on steroid of Morningrise shows a shocking presence in some of the songwriting shifts that occurred on My Arms, Your Hearse.
This would not be the sole side work that would come to influence the shape of Opeth to come, however. While Åkerfeldt's contributions to Edge of Sanity's Crimson are less thorough than what he provided on Katatonia's Brave Murder Day, comprising solely additional vocals and guitars, it nonetheless serves as a second key work signaling the pivot from the band that had produced the first two studio albums and the band, as well as its sonic mindset, that would record the following four. Edge of Sanity, led by Dan Swanö, can in many ways be seen as the forebears of Opeth, writing material around the same time but beating them to the punch in terms of published records by several years.
Their run from their debut Nothing but Death Remains through Unorthodox and The Spectral Sorrows saw a slowly accumulating approach to progressive death metal that, unlike their Floridian contemporaries in groups such as Atheist, Death and Cynic, bore a striking resemblance to progressive rock itself and not just an application of prog ideas to a metal format. By the time of Opeth's debut, they had released the record Purgatory Afterglow, now considered a masterpiece in the spaces of progressive and melodic death metal. These releases would pale in comparison, both in terms of their own critical esteem as well as their impact upon the broader musical world of death metal, to Crimson.
A single-song forty-minute track feeling often like death metal's answer to Thick as a Brick, Crimson is a concept album describing a fantastical Children of Men style scenario of infertility of humanity, oppression by monarchs, and ruined prophecies; while the subject matter would differ greatly from the matter covered by Opeth, this would be the first concept record Åkerfeldt had worked on, something that no doubt provided a spark of cross pollination. Åkerfeldt and Swanö's influences were, of course, plucked from similar sources anyway; they were roommates for a time after all and Swanö had handled production on the first two Opeth albums.
Interestingly, while their collaborations in a musician-producer capacity ceased following Morningrise, Opeth's work from My Arms, Your Hearse begins more strongly resembling both the overall production as well as aspects of sound design showcased on Edge of Sanity records rather than Opeth's own early sound. Still, one can hear parallels to the riff construction of Opeth from those earlier records present here, again indicating less a direct influence as much as shared preceding influences and a clearly deep kinship. Following Akerfeldt's work on this record, Opeth would tilt toward a more definitively progressive rock/death metal hybrid sound opposing their earlier interpolation of black metal influences from both the early wave of Norwegian bands and predecessors such as Bathory and Celtic Frost. Most importantly however is the role of Crimson as the first time Åkerfeldt and Swanö placed themselves on record as direct musical collaborators, a relationship that would, some years later, have a profound impact on Opeth's overall trajectory.
That aforementioned image, that of late 70s Rush, bears repeating. Opeth, in their earliest two record, strongly resembled that trio, less in terms of obvious sonics and more in terms of both ambition and the shape that ambition took on recorded material. In both cases, we see future progressive music heavyweights pushing themselves to transcend their origins, be it heavy blues rock in the case of Rush or death metal in its most primitive form for Opeth. Neither of them sought this overcoming out of disparagement to their origins; in fact, both would return to those shores in their own ways as their careers went on, something that will be discussed more in length later.
But there was a clear attempt in both Rush and Opeth's case of tackling the boundless virtuosity in both technical playing and songwriting that prog offered as a means of intensifying and challenging their skills. In the case of both, this meant song lengths rapidly increasing, with Rush famously delivering three roughly 20-minute epics and a slew of songs over or around the 10 minute mark in a flurry of material released between 1975's Caress of Steel and 1978's Hemispheres and for Opeth the aforementioned girthy epics of Orchid becoming the de rigueur songform on Morningrise.
Both cases, it must be noted, produced superlative work, work without which we would not have received the bands that came after. But likewise in both cases, there was a conspicuous and conscious choice to pare down, not out of shame but out of mastery, a means of pursuing how to make each part that lands on the records more impactful so as to strengthen the overall material. In neither case were longer cuts totally verboten either, with Rush delivering a few cuts around the 10 minute mark following and quite a number nudging past the 6 minute mark and in Opeth's case never truly abandoning the 10-minute figure. But in both cases, the gestalt lesson was often one more grounded in pacing both themselves and the imaginations and senses of the listener, a sharper image of how to orient the ebbs and flows of an album-length piece of work to retain total attention for its duration.
Those elements taken care of, it's time to mention the most commonly cited cause of the directional difference between My Arms, Your Hearse and its predecessor, that being the near-total lineup change. Though Åkerfeldt has been elusive on the particular reasons why, he has said that on a conference call he and Lindgren released Johan De Farfalla from the band, news of which incensed Anders Nordin, their drummer at the time, to also quit. Åkerfeldt apparently was stunned by the move, not seeing the two members as particularly close, but from the outside and with the passage of time it feels safe to assume that there was perhaps already a sense that Opeth was Mikael's band and anxiety surrounding this may have affected the decision, with the others perhaps hoping for a more equitable arrangement for the band. Regardless of the root of that tension, it left Opeth once more as only a few members, albeit the remaining two of Åkerfeldt and Lindgren were the primary writing duo of the group.
Famously, they wound up hiring Martin Lopez and Martin Mendez, friends and former bandmates in the smaller black metal group Eternal before Lopez briefly drummed for melodic death metal band Amon Amarth on their debut record, as well as shared time in the early days of melodic/progressive death metal band Requiem Aeternam and being founding members of Fifth to Infinity, a black/death metal band Lopez would eventually return to in the mid 2010s to record their debut roughly 20 years after forming. This dual hiring was despite concerns of their accidentally forming two camps in the band, each a duo who'd known each other, a concern that must have been heightened given the recent lineup change itself. Time constraints in the studio would mean that, while Lopez would be able to lay down drum tracks, Mendez would not be able to learn the pieces quickly enough to put down bass, causing the group to briefly record as a trio.
It is ironic, all told, that My Arms, Your Hearse is broadly considered the band's initial turn away from extreme metal toward progressive metal, especially the beginning of their distancing from black metal as a key element of their sound, given how much more aggressive Lopez's drumming is compared to Nordin's. A keen comparison would be the shift in Genesis' sound when John Mayhew was replaced with Phil Collins. The former was a competent drummer, capably serving the needs of the song and even, on "The Knife", able to produce some driving and energetic punctuating work. But it was ultimately the incredible dynamism of the latter which would help propel Genesis into being capable, at last, of pursuing the kind of intense progressive work that would mark their key years from Nursery Cryme all the way up to Duke.
Likewise, Opeth with Nordin ironically conformed more to a progressive rock tonality, with his metal chops serving more as accents to otherwise broad, pastoral progressive work, despite the black metal trappings time laid over the pieces. Had he remained, perhaps we would have seen Opeth take up where groups like Änglagård, Spock's Beard and classic prog Swedish mainstays Kaipa, who had briefly reunited in the early 90s before their full reunion in the early 2000s. Instead, with Lopez's more acute and driving metal playing, especially his ferocious double bass work, My Arms, Your Hearse took on the characteristic of death metal, often truncating the spidery and complex lacework lines of Morningrise for something at once more elegant in its streamlined shape as much as it was more directly impactful.
The decision to include Martin Lopez is, in retrospect, quite an obvious one. Prior to joining Opeth, Lopez had been involved in five bands who had produced material. Of those, it is most likely that it was his work recording drums on the Amon Amarth debut Once Sent from the Golden Hall that placed him strongly on the radar of the Opeth camp, given Amon Amarth's presence within the scene at the time as well as the strong death metal leanings of that record. Amon Amarth is, truth be told, a band at once much better than most underground extreme metal fans tend to recognize and a notch or two less impressive than more mainstream fans tend to view them. As silly as it can be to see the rowing pits of their shows in photographs, they're a band that does admittedly hew quite strongly to the originating live ethos of heavy metal; somewhere between your second to fifth beer, they open up tremendously in a live setting and become frankly a hell of a lot of fun.
That said, while the drumming on some of their mid-period records shows the same kind of light progressive flourish that any decently polished death metal combo might employ to spice up the rhythm section, they are not precisely known for the same kind of hyper-dynamic drumming that might grace, say, a Necrophagist record. Still, Lopez's performance, while often dialing down in his capabilities to produce some grinding, blasting grooves, shows glimpses of the flourish he would later deploy on Opeth. Given that, for years and years, this was the only easily accessible recording of his prior to his joining the group, the efflorescence of him as a drummer in Opeth seemed if not miraculous then at least startling.
It is the other four much smaller groups he was in that fills in the image a great deal more. Starting in Uruguay, the home country of both him and Martin Mendez, we have the group Eternal, a progressive black metal group that only produced a single demo titled ...and the Sky Was Entombed By Flames, which would have been released roughly at the same time as Morningrise. This demo tape, through its black metal hiss and grim, shows the greatest similarity to the later work Lopez and Mendez both would produce with Opeth. Here we see winding and dynamic acoustic arrangements that effloresce brilliantly into lo-fi but still at times quite acrobatic black metal riffing, making good on the admittedly somewhat false promise of the heavier black metal leanings of Opeth's earlier material.
There is a wide dynamism over these tracks, both in terms of the drumming styles deployed as well as the overall playing and arrangement by the string players. Shockingly, one of these players is Lopez himself, who performs a quite stunning acoustic piece on the fifth track, revealing a skill its hard not to desire he might deploy more often. Given how minor the group was even in their own country, it seems unlikely that Åkerfeldt and Lindgren would have come into contact with this tape prior to his hiring, which makes the sharp and noticeable similarities not only in the material Opeth was producing in the period but the kind of dynamism that would animate the initial burst of records with Lopez and Mendez so intriguing. We often view Åkerfeldt as not just the primary but nearly the sole creative force within the band, but moments like this show that there is indeed a feedback relationship with the other members, one which fleshes out the admittedly nearly-complete demos we know Åkerfeldt produces. Unlike the Crowley demo in their earliest days, the Eternal demo doesn't show as much an alternate trajectory Opeth might have taken but an illuminating glimpse into the how and why of the group's shift from My Arms, Your Hearse forward.
The next three groups can be considered roughly contiguous with one another. Requiem Aeternam, a progressive black metal band from Uruguay. Their stay in the group was short-lived, producing only a handful of tracks before being replaced by other players. What they made leaned heavier on the post-Dream Theater interpolation of prog playing in extreme metal contexts we saw in the aftermath of Awake's reception, with the string players doing charming but unimpressive tributes to the kinds of highly-chromatic playing musicians new to prog seem to cleave to.
Interestingly, after both Lopez and Mendez departed this group, they would sharpen their writing and playing tremendously, producing a three-album run of underrated underground progressive extreme metal records terminating in 2010's Destiny-Man, as well as a fully instrumental record over a decade later that came out in 2023 that, alas, I have not had the chance to peruse as of yet. Had the two Martins stayed in this group, it's not terribly difficult to imagine them rising to perhaps a slightly higher esteem within the underground progressive metal circles, lingering in the same Facebook groups that keep groups like Dali's Dilemma and Khallice (not to be confused with Krallice) alive. The captivating alternate futures of Opeth and its associates abound.
Following their departure from Requiem Aeternam, the two Martin's formed melodic black metal band Vinterkrig, a group that featured Mendez on lead guitars as opposed to bass on their sole demo album. The demo circulated in heavily hissy form for years before, as of two years ago, being remastered and released. The material here is a striking step up from the Requiem Aeternam material, returning to the kind of dynamic arrangements of Eternal but with tighter riffing and a greater sense of energy. It's not hard to imagine that this group may have had legs behind it, given how the songs here, alternating between being led by the great dual-guitar work and the lush keyboards, manage to deliver a great sense of urgency and energy without sacrificing the more atmospheric and grandiose air this kind of melodic black metal craves.
The demo sadly terminates in what feels like the middle of a song, indicating the end of the composed material of this combo, leaving a feeling of great frustration. Still, seeing the two Martins dial in here, producing an accessible and deeply catchy version of the progressive and extreme metal elements they had been balancing in their previous groups together is a clear forward step in their evolution toward the players that would help to so drastically reshape Opeth. It is also, coincidentally, their introduction as players within the broader Swedish scene.
After leaving Vinterkrig, the two Martins formed a progressive metal band called Fifth to Infinity, writing enough material to eventually produce a full-length album that would confoundingly remain on the shelf until 2015. Technically, the two Martins remained active members of this group until right about when Blackwater Park finally broke through and made Opeth into a full-time gig for all involved. The finished record would be recorded nearly two decades after writing began on it, thankfully featuring Lopez himself on the kit, allowing a kind of time-warped perspective of its influence on his approach to Opeth, given that it was both one of the last things he worked on before joining and then a recording he produced a number of years after leaving.
Both the material here and Lopez's performance, and presumably Mendez's own writing, makes the synergy between the camps of Akerfeldt/Lindgren and the two Martins obvious; how much of this relates to Opeth's monumental rise in esteem in the progressive and metal musical worlds as well as Lopez's own involvement with them prior to cutting these tracks is ambiguous but almost certainly above zero. Those lingering question marks make this a fascinating record to ponder for fans of Opeth who want to dig deeper into those ephemera. Thankfully, they are not questions strictly necessary to enjoy this record. Prior to researching for this chapter, I was unaware of this group save for a half-remembered sense that I'd heard the name in passing. It's a strong record, one I'm glad has entered my field of vision; one hopes they make another in a quicker pace than it took to produce this debut.
While what I've written largely focuses on the dynamic drum performances of Lopez, showcasing his ability not only to play blastbeats and other extreme metal tropes but also more adventurous and progressive playing, this is only because, initially, the band only intended to hire Lopez. Admittedly on these early recordings of the duo of the two Martins, the drummer is the one stealing the show, often being the most immediately catching of the two players. How fascinating it is then that the insistence of Lopez as well as the strong audition of Mendez himself led the duo of Åkerfeldt and Lindgren to finally relent and allow Lopez's longtime rhythm section partner into the group.
Mendez, it can safely be said, has had an outsized impact on the trajectory and sound of Opeth, second only to Åkerfeldt himself. So much of what we know of the band simply wouldn't have come to pass were it not for the way the recordings together with Lopez made that powerhouse prog drummer so adamant that he remain in a rhythm section with a player who, while quite good on those early recordings, wouldn't really show what he was made of until he was in Opeth itself. And thus how doubly ironic that he would not even get to play on this record, given the time constraints in the studio, forcing Åkerfeldt to pick up the bass instead.
Which leads us, at last, to My Arms, Your Hearse itself. The record is a concept album, the first of three explicitly stated to be so by the group itself. Lyrically, the focus remains on the gothic and literary underpinnings of the group, being a ghost story involving a departed lover being able to return to the world to gaze again on his love only to find that he has been erased from her world. Like many great bands before them, the usage of the concept album form here for Opeth served, it seems, mostly to create a dynamic arc for the record, to provide a structure to the already-dynamic forms and ideas that had been present in the group from the earliest demos of the Akerfeldt-lead iteration of the band. Perhaps the key difference between their usage of the form and that of others is that it is often deployed by bands less known for progressive elements to encourage a more diverse range of sounds and ideas, to push groups to be inventive beyond the typical constraints of pop or hard rock or the like.
Opeth, meanwhile, had no shortage of variance even on Orchid. Here, instead, the concept album form seems to be used, in conjunction with the more economic songwriting elements gleaned from Katatonia, to concentrate those variances into contained and potent songs. The reputation of this record, which you are likely already aware of if you are reading this, testifies to the success of this operation compared to Morningrise; while that previous record is replete with brilliant passages and compositions (especially on the sonically refreshed remaster), My Arms, Your Hearse is packed with brilliant songs. It is no surprise that "Demon of the Fall", the first Opeth song many hear (myself included), has become a staple of their live performances and something of a signature song. On it, we see distilled in less than half the time any of the tracks on the previous record took a piece that contains just as much of a dynamic range but with substantially mightier hooks.
This was the first Opeth album I heard all the way through. It would have been 2000 or 2001, somewhere around when Blackwater Park came out, when my friend Jono and I, having been blown away by the scattered Opeth we'd downloaded but especially by "Demon", set about downloading the remainder of the tracks here. Still to this day, the album retains that sense of youthful freshness, the sound of the record that would permanently change the arc of my life, introducing me (in a certain sense at least) forcefully to both the progressive and the extreme music that would become so central to me. Thus, this record plays like a greatest hits record, an element that certainly was intentional given the deliberately more forceful songs and compositions on this record.
"When", the longest track, plays less like a prog epic of just over 9 minutes and more like a galeful burst of death metal flecked in black, with each of its changes adding to its brooding intensity without ever letting the sails slack. "April Ethereal" is its twin in terms of creating a shadow-cloaked gothic atmosphere in an otherwise quite heavy record, a heaviness that perhaps might seem diminished to those now innured to extreme metal but one which is strongly present to those arriving here for the first time. The decision to name the record after a line from "Drip Drip" from Comus' masterpiece debut progressive folk record First Utterance feels wise given the shared cryptic, cruel, burnt and mutilated sense of the gothic and grotesque shared between both records.
The closing duo of "Credence" and "Karma" plays like a gradually building storm, starting in the world of Jethro Tull before ending in the realms of Tucker-era Morbid Angel, Åkerfeldt's stated favorite death metal vocalist. "The Amen Corner" sits in the middle of the record, closing out the first half just before "Demon" kicks off the second, and often finds itself underrated in the overall estimation of the material from this album only because of its placement between two of the greatest progressive death metal tracks of all time in "When" and "Demon". This is also said without mentioning the brilliant instrumentals "Prologue", "Epilogue" and middle track "Madrigal", which continued the influence of Steve Hackett's similarly beautiful fingerpicked acoustic instrumental pieces from early Genesis records here.
Of note as well is the lyrical approach to this album, in which every song ended on the words that were the title of the chapter to come after it. This includes, for the eagle-eyed, the instrumentals, which are given lyrics and libretto in the booklet, often contextualizing or extending the story of the album much more so than you might imagine otherwise wordless pieces to do so. The approach is at times definitely a bit on-the-nose, having the same silly and slightly pretentious feeling as prog at its peak, but likewise served to push the ambition of Åkerfeldt's songwriting and lyricism beyond the short portraits that made up Orchid or the elaborate and frankly often confusing pieces on Morningrise. It, like so much else of this record, was a developmental necessity, a strident breaking from the old, at least in certain senses, in order to make room for the new.
And while there is much of the Opeth we all would come to love present on their first two albums, substantially more than many seem willing to recognize if operating by memory alone, it is truly here that we hear the nearly-completed image of what Opeth would be for the next many, many years. For many, this record sits as one of the group's masterworks; given its historical and evolutionary importance in the lineage of the group, that estimation is still a quite valid one, and a stance you wouldn't hear many argue against if shared online or among friends. If anything, the key weaknesses of this record only become strongly apparent when comparing it to what would come after.
Åkerfeldt's clean singing, for instance, while strongly improved here compared to the first two albums, still has moments of amateurish strain that would by their next record and all subsequent ones disappear completely. Likewise, the initial mix felt muddy and haphazard at times, with the group and their label clearly simply lacking the resources to give it the dynamism the material and in fact the band as a whole wanted. Even the remaster doesn't fully solve this, although it stays closest to the original released sound of the albums of the three remasters of this era. Instead, it reveals another lurking issue, which is that Åkerfeldt's bass parts are simply substantially less compelling than Mendez's to come would be or that the deeply underrated De Farfalla's were before. This is an understandable weakness: after all, Åkerfeldt did not initially intend to play bass on the record. Subsequent live recordings with Mendez show only slight tweaks, largely to tone and the overall balance of instruments, but produces a more coherent and forceful image of the material, which unlike some elements of the earliest period of Opeth still produce spell-binding and timeless performances.
Prior to writing this book-length project I was convinced the image of My Arms, Your Hearse as the evolutionary eruption of the group, the dialectical intensification thresholding event per Deleuze, was a naive view. In fact, as I wrote the first two chapters of this covering the two initial records, I became more convinced of this position. After all, what I was unearthing wish so much close listening were the many elements I and so many others knew to be central to Opeth's identity present not just in germinal but often in complete form. But the biggest shift for me came not so much in analyzing the material itself, which hews far closer to Orchid and Morningrise than many would care to admit, but the many evolutionary strands of side material produced by Åkerfeldt as well as the entering Martins, which suddenly cast such a shocking new light on the record that emerged.
Those contexts helped emphasize the smaller touches, the contraction and tightening of material that felt less like trimming the fat and more like concentrating the broth, as Åkerfeldt took a fine-toothed comb to the elements that were both unique and successful within Opeth and strove to make them as potent as possible. This early period of the group is indicative of the law of small changes in art, where its often less the pure invention and more the slight editorial adjustment of existing elements that causes a group to go from sounding primitive and developmental into the finished and fully-formed versions of themselves, like when Queen emerged from the fantastical prog rock pomp and proto-heavy metal of their first three records to drop A Night at the Opera or when a keen-eared Rush applied the sense of pacing and development they had on Fly by Night to the more expansive and virtuosic ideas they showcased on the messy but fascinating Caress of Steel to produce the rousing title track of 2112 that wound up saving their career. We often look for signs of life in the most elastic and dynamic portraits and landscapes of the galleries of artists' lives and careers; here we learn to witness the subtle, fine filigreed change that emerges in still life.