Editor's note: what is about to follow over the next few 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!
Given the previous analytic of My Arms, Your Hearse, Still Life, the group's fourth record, is ironically rendered almost fait accompli. The group clearly understood the aesthetic successes both in shifting songwriting and engineering/mixing principles on their previous record, as Still Life in continuity reveals itself more as a triaging of successful elements than any radical additions. It's funny: prior to working on this series, I had assumed, as likely some of you did reading it, that this would be one of the records with the most to say. After all, it is rightly considered a high-water mark not just of the band's discography but of progressive and extreme metal as a whole. It is ranked 54th best progressive record of all time on ProgArchives at time of this writing, a position it has hovered around for roughly a decade. This is notable in part because that site was especially conservative in their userbase and moderation for years, only adding spaces for post-rock and the more progressive wing of extreme metal in the past decade or so, despite progressive metal having long since moved past the trad metal-rooted sound of the 70s to 90s of the genre. Likewise, Metal Archives sees its rating at 86%, the highest of any Opeth studio record. Rateyourmusic, a site that has let become famous for its very idiosyncratic and perhaps overly online tastes in music, has the record rated 383rd of all time alongside sharing the mutual highest rating of an Opeth album with its follow up. I cite these statistics not because these sites are necessarily the most reliable but to show that, outside of even the normal critical venues that fawned over this record, Still Life is still well-regarded in fan circles even today, just over 25 years after its release.
All of this is a way to say that the next few paragraphs are perhaps easy to anticipate. The album opens with "The Moor", a song which, given the revelatory remasters of their first two records, feels less epiphanic these days but in its day and frankly for many, many years after felt like precisely the moment that Opeth as we know it coalesced in front of our eyes. It is a song that has everything, from the prog rock knotted riffs to the death metal riffs and melo-death lead lines to the robust and shockingly varied rhythm section, clearly showing a greater breadth and command of their role than frankly most death metal bands even today.
There are acoustic passages, resplendent clean singing and, notably, the first vocal performances of both cleans and growls Akerfeldt put to tape that felt like they had the power that made him such an immediately canonized performer. Growing up, I had heard he had one of the best voices in the genre, clean or dirty; listening to the first two albums and even long stretches of My Arms, with its strange choices of takes used for the final mixes, would have made this a hard sell. But on this song, suddenly the vision becomes clear. Unsurprisingly, Mendez's performance on bass is too a revelation, being supple and subtle, feeling at times more like a folk or jazz bassist in its support than a heavy metal player. His synchronicity with Martin Lopez allows both to create a much richer rhythmic palette, one which, an album after their joining the band, justified their adamant efforts to remain together in the new group.
"Godhead's Lament" is more of the same in frankly the best possible way; after all, when your lead track is almost three decades on still a legendary progressive metal track, who wouldn't want a second of equal power to it just behind? Interestingly, this structural format of the group, using two closely related songs back to back as openers, would be used again over the course of their career, and for clear reason. Two tracks of this level of pure force, each running roughly ten minutes apiece, puts the listener in mind almost immediately of the superlative quality of the record, a mind-state that could overcome frankly quite a bit of lacking material after. And yet, the follow up to that song is "Benighted", still to this day my favorite ballad of the group, with its resplendently beautiful fingerpicked acoustic guitar pattern.
I have impossibly fond memories of this song: my best friend Jono figuring clumsily how to play it on guitar, one of the few songs he ever learned, while he crooned the lyrics in warbly voice. It was while he played that I picked up the vocal, at first just singing along with my friend; we discovered then that, maybe, just maybe, I had the voice, that maybe I was not destined to sit behind a drumkit forever. Youthful bands for our group of friends never really went anywhere, rarely making it out of the basement, but there is a particular verve to bonds of music in that capacity, where you get to, even just briefly, live inside of the song, become an active dance partner to it rather than a passive recipient. Lyrically, this was the first song of the record I was ever able to dive into, for the clear reason of the cleanness of the singing. Its baroque, delicate lyricism stuck with me, drove me like the discovery of Baudelaire and Rimbaud did, like reading Maldoror and Melmoth did, to pluck up the pen and succumb to more riven and riverlike floes of language.
The record as a whole amplifies the mournful and gothic sensibility of their first three albums. This time, the album focuses on, in brief, a forbidden love, cursed by inquisitors who, in their ruthlessness, kill first the woman of the relationship then, following the maddened killing spree of the man, him as well. The focus here is less on haunting and more on despair, loss, the graveside stare, the rumination on things absent in their permanence. In this context, the whining lead guitars, more often harmonized and droning than proper solos, feel like a programmatic flair, the crying of mourners rendered in music.
As mentioned, these little gothic flourishes have not been uncommon in Opeth's work up to this point; Still Life instead sees not only their intensification but also their application to songs that are frankly more tautly bound than those on their previous two records. Morningrise and My Arms, Your Hearse showed the band exploring the extended structures both of longform songs and album-length lyrical concepts to mixed success; here, lessons are learned, applied to the more strongly song-oriented material of their debut record but with the sonic embellishments and flourishes acquired on the path. Musically, it is hard to view this as anything other than the apex of the first years of the group. The concept is still largely inconsequential to enjoyment of the record but, for the first time since their debut, lines and lyrics rise up from the murk to become catching, thorns in the skin.
"Moonlapse Vertigo" into "Face of Melinda" duplicates the duo of "Godhead's Lament" and "Benighted", a gothic progressive metal song flecked with extreme metal passages flowing into a ballad, here a jazzier number with fretless bass and some of the sharpest playing the group had put to tape up to this point, ending with a gorgeous harmonized lead distorted guitar part, almost taking the Metallica form of ballads which begin clean and end with metal theatrics. In contrast, it is with "Serenity Painted Death" that we get the biggest shakeup to the sonics of the record. Between the jagged songwriting and the particulars of the riff and lyrics, this feels almost like a track written in their demo years or perhaps a shorter piece penned during the recording of Morningrise that never made it to tape. In this context, following the previous five tracks, its atypical level of heaviness, even half-quoting Covenent and Domination-era Morbid Angel at one point, provides a necessary punch up.
I stand by my stance that referring to Opeth as a death metal band has always been more an associative quality than their true interior identity, but this is one of the songs that most directly challenges that stance, even if the middle instrumental and clean sung section feels something akin to Queensryche meets Dream Theater with a meatier guitar tone. It is still one of my favorite songs by the group; the savagery of the chorus is one that I used to practice harsh vocals for years and still to this day conjures precisely the same childlike glee with the ferocity of death metal that made me fall in love with the genre. It's funny to me that the album closer "White Cluster" tends to fade in my memory so much, leaving me hardly able to recall a lyric or riff after its final notes fade out. This is shocking precisely because during the song, I can seemingly hum every bar, drum every fill, sing every lyric. This is because, I think, of the dreamlike quality of records or novels or films when they absorb you; in this context, those great moments that puncture the dream to embed themselves into your brain are perhaps a failing of the form, shattering the spell, while the proceedings of this track feel almost like the natural end, like I am immersed in the events musically and narratively. It's a fascinating effect.
It is on Still Life that an aspect of Opeth's sound begins to become more noticeable: the influence of melancholic rock, particular along the lines of Alice in Chains. While this connection would later be explicated more directly, with the group covering "Would?", the closing track of Alice in Chains' masterpiece Dirt, it is something that begins to differentiate the band most strongly on this record, helping to set it apart from the other black, death and folk metal albums of the time, as well as the rising tide of "dark metal", music that blended these sonic elements without necessarily bridging into explicitly extreme territory. While its easier to point at these sonic elements in Opeth's sound and source them to obscure 60s and 70s prog/psych acts, such as the one the title of this record is plucked from (more on that in a moment), its worth keeping in mind their ear toward contemporary music as well.
By this point, comrades-in-arms Katatonia had already made their shift toward the progressive/alternative rock sound they still carry today, first with Discouraged Ones which featured largely clean vocals against a transitional sonic palette caught somewhere between early melodic death metal and mid-paced gothic metal and second with Tonight's Decision which saw the band change over more fully to the sound the band has since become known for. In both of these albums, Akerfeldt provided backing vocals and is credited with co-production. In retrospect, it's easy to see these influences coming to bear on My Arms, Your Hearse as well, developing from the more dreary folk of Nick Drake and the like which had made itself clear on Morningrise into something with a more contemporary tinge. This is mostly notable as one of many instances Opeth signaled well in advance the inevitable shift the band would take on years later, a move that in retrospect is much more minor than it was originally treated and should have come as far less of a surprise, regardless of one's feelings on the albums themselves.
While to my perusal I have found no mention of Akerfeldt crediting the title of this record to the one-album prog/psych group Still Life, it seems almost a given that this is the origin of the name, especially given that the albums before and after it are titled after first a Comus lyric and then another obscure record. These little nods were, prior to the group's covers becoming a more expected element of their bonus material, one of the ways Akerfeldt seemed to nod to the wider sonic palette he was drawing from as he developed as a songwriter. Compared to the Celtic Frost and Iron Maiden covers the band recorded and which ended up on many issues of My Arms, Your Hearse, this is certainly a more prescient nod to the direction the band would one day take.
Still Life, the sole record by the group of the same name, is an organ-lead prog/psych record akin to Van der Graaf Generator or Atomic Rooster, featuring six cuts averaging just over six minutes per song. In an objective sense, it becomes clear after a few songs why the band did not break out; though promising, this record features only a few highs, such as album opener "People In Black", often falling closer to the somewhat muted organ-driven R&B/early prog hybrid sound that could also be found on Genesis' Trespass, another record that has the esteem it does more because of where those ideas would lead than purely the material contained on it. In another world, this group would have continued and, having done so, it would be easy to imagine some interesting developments of their sound. Alas: it was not to be so. For our purposes, they serve mostly as an interesting nod to the influences Akerfeldt was beginning to take in as a songwriter. Comparing this record's palette and approach to the period of Opeth's work from Heritage forward, it feels like an impossibly prescient signal of things to come; in the intervening years, this organ and piano driven sonic form would interpolate itself into their sonic footprint as early as the very next record, bridging from the follow up to Still Life all the way to the eventual change of the band's approach.
In a perfect world, an aesthetic peak of a group would also coincide with financial or at least popularity thresholding. Alas, here, it is not so. Opeth struggled to break through, playing their first US show in the lead up to its release which would be their sole performance on that side of the Atlantic for several years. Sales were slow, which seems in retrospect especially shocking considering the record was engineered by Fredrik Nordstrom, the man behind the boards of At the Gates' final records of their first incarnation as well as the early material of both In Flames and Dark Tranquillity. The sound found here is comparable to those groups in the engineering and production and the latent progressive lilt in their material, gathered by influence from NWOBHM and 80s prog metal bands which were big in hesher scenes, is tilted forward.
I think we sometimes see Opeth positioned as somehow radically unique among their peers at the time, but this is not so, especially among the particular circles of burgeoning sounds and ideas in underground heavy metal even specifically telescoped down to Sweden of the 90s. In fact, looking back, it is tremendously difficult to parse precisely when Opeth broke, so to speak. The previous record saw the band find what would become the iconic sound of the band, but had not yet sharpened its execution. This album, while cited by many as their best work, still showed a group struggling to find themselves in a larger sense, to connect with an audience. A key takeaway however is, for as much as I love My Arms, Your Hearse and as much as I've grown to love Morningrise given the revelatory nature of its recent remastering, had they stopped after album three, they would have been remembered as an interesting minor band. It is on this album that they first put down material that would come to cement their legacy as one of the greatest groups of the form. How ironic it is then that, at the time, this album went unrecognized and undersung.
An aspect of this record, and indeed of the band as a whole to some extent, that is perhaps unsurprising but that I had been resistant of for years is how proximal or at times identical their approach to death metal is to the then-burgeoning melodic death metal scene in Sweden. I will confess: melodic death metal, even as I was on-boarding myself to more extreme music from relatively lighter heavy fare, was always a tough sell for me. My general sentiment of the genre has always been that it splits the difference between two idioms I love, traditional heavy metal and death metal, in a way that foreshortens the aspects of both I like the most. Often the melodic and triumphant elements of traditional heavy metal feel sullied by extreme tones and the seeming ubiquity of mid-tempo stomps rather than the sense of the frantic gallop or manic verve of Maiden, Priest or others of that classic idiom.
Likewise, the death metal components feel substantially tamed by the interpolation of traditional heavy metal, lacking the level of maliciousness, the gothic splendor, the burrowing ugly riffs, or that rancid reek of death and grave dirt that makes death metal so compelling for me. It's strange to me that black metal, a genre that often defines itself as oppositional to a lot of what makes traditional heavy metal work, often at least on its face eschewing a kind of cleanliness and adeptness at their instruments that would befit those elements, winds up taking on traditional heavy metal elements so well. (Obviously, this is because the Luddite rudimentary playing of a lot of black metal bands, like punk bands before them, is a put-on meant to achieve an aesthetic end, not a real truth of their lack of technical acumen.)
But on revisiting the early records of Dark Tranquillity, particularly Skydancer and The Gallery, as well as the first few In Flames records, its hard not to hear just an obvious similarity in engineering and soundscaping, due to the shared engineer, but also in a lot of the songwriting elements. Akerfeldt has referred to this record in some interviews as the apex of his twin-lead era of songwriting, moving away from the counterpoint-heavy medievalisms of Morningrise for something more obviously indebted to this history of heavy metal. The Iron Maiden and Celtic Frost covers that preceded this release, along with his general retro interests, may even deceive you into thinking you know where that influence originates! So imagine my surprise on pressing play on a few records to double check elements of this chapter, done after I'd sent its first draft off, when I hear riffs that sound near-identical to those found on Still Life.
This is, to be clear, not an accusation of plagiarism; styles inevitably cohere to certain rhythmic patterns, certain harmonic progressions and resolutions, certain approaches to lead lines, not to mention the general iterative element of any genre. Originality is not often so much false as it is an illusion, something experiential but not fundamental, a sign that you have been rendered successfully unaware of the lineages of material rather than them being truly inexplicably without origin at all. That we can sometimes source the confluence of elements that leads to an aesthetic development, whether consciously accrued by the artist or not, in no way detracts from the thing that is made. In this instance, Still Life is, I believe, quite handily, a superior record to those early melodic death metal classics, regardless of my misgivings about the genre as a whole. I saw this mostly in the interest of dispelling as much as possible any notion of Opeth as "a band apart", somehow uniquely interested in classic rock or progressive music or folk or even the work of their peers. Their excellence, put simply, is not derived from doing something no one else has done before or mixing elements no one has ever mixed before, but in doing it better than most of their peers.
In context, second-wave black metal was, by this time, largely branching into progressive territory itself. By the late 90s, Ulver had abandoned the style, never to return, instead pursuing a variety of interests shockingly parallel to Akerfeldt's own, from 60s psychedelic rock to the progressive developments of the 70s in rock, folk and electronic music, as well as their own interests in industrial music, trip-hop and the David Sylvian-influenced wing of world music/rock fusion. Mayhem was in the process of reconfiguring themselves into what would become two decades of shockingly strange material, from their (I am correct here) magnum opus Grand Declaration of War and its strange avant-garde approaches to the increasingly technical and progressive riff-writing of Chimera and Esoteric Warfare to come.
Enslaved, a constant black metal mirror to Opeth's own developments, had always incorporated similar progressive and psychedelic elements in their black metal songwriting but were preparing in 1999 the material that would become Mordraum, the album that would begin most clearly to transition the band to a more broadly progressive metal band. This pattern continues on and on, from Borknagar to Limbonic Art to the progressive/gothic developments of Cradle of Filth, then still a respected member of the black metal underground, to Agalloch's debut Pale Folklore in 1999 and on. The fusion of these elements found in Still Life—the folk, the prog, the melodic death metal, the brutality, the gothic atmospherics and storytelling—were in many ways the norm of this era of underground music of this ilk.
The nature of artistic and aesthetic excellence is often one different from interest. To be interesting is a wider field: failures are interesting, struggles are interesting, atypical and confounding moves are interesting, as well as promising shifts that have yet to fulfill themselves. This level of interest over excellence is what so often makes everything from avant-garde work to debut works of groups or genres so fascinating; seeing the primordial image pre-definition, just as it is beginning to emerge into itself. Excellence is far tricker; there is a tedious wasteland between interest and excellence called mediocrity or its banal cousin competence in which many works waste away, things that are good but only good, decent but not compelling. Depending on your taste, this either demands damning negative reviews and excoriating critical evaluations about its failure to achieve excellence or a gentler, kinder approach accepting that frankly most work will land in this middle space. My argument is simple: On the three albums prior to this one, despite my great love of that material, Opeth was interesting. On Still Life, Opeth became excellent.