Opeth is what I like to call a "gateway death metal" group. They represent an easy and relatively accessible way to gain an appreciation of extreme metal, what with their penchant for weaving beautiful melodies and catchy riffs into crushingly heavy songs, and contrasting conventional vocals with hoarse cookie monster-style growls. And if Opeth is a "gateway metal" band, Still Life is the "gateway Opeth" album - one of their most balanced and accessible efforts that also happens to be consistently good.Opeth have always consciously treaded a line somewhere between death metal and progressive rock, with earlier albums like Orchid and My Arms, Your Hearse being raw and more metallish and recent efforts like Blackwater Park more proggy. Still Life is arguably where they got the balance just right: there's that familiar mid-tempo death metal crunch, Mikael Åkerfeldt's surprisingly expressive growled vocals, and plenty of blast drumming; but there are also some downright beautiful slower passages, Mikael Åkerfeldt's surprisingly expressive sung vocals, and catchy melodies. The band has always been capable of turning on a dime and switching between styles, and they do so here with great ease, making songs with multiple abrupt dynamic shifts seem natural and intuitive.
"Godhead's Lament" is perhaps the perfect end result of what Opeth was trying to do at this point in their career: it starts off with some fast, heavy guitar crunch and Åkerfeldt's imposing growl (so aggressive here that he's almost screaming), before hitting upon an awesome mid-tempo riff and then a brief guitar solo before Åkerfeldt begins singing in a strong, clean voice. The song slows even more, opening up some space with touches of acoustic guitar adding flourishes to a slow electric guitar melody in the background, before some more surprisingly moving clean singing that abruptly shifts back into the uptempo heavy metal theme from the beginning of the song. Everything is so well put together that the transitions are seamless and logical; the heavy parts are headbang-worthy and the softer parts are movingly pretty. At the root of it, this is what Opeth have been after ever since they got started; "Godhead's Lament" is one of their great successes.
The rest of the album is based around the same premise: blend metal and melodic prog into a seamless whole. Other songs succeed to a lesser degree, but they're good across the board. Still Life is the best entry into Opeth for prog fans who have a passing interest in more extreme forms of metal than they can get from Dream Theater. At the core, Opeth is basically a riff band that likes to hop between loud and soft sections, but they do it well enough that their formula is only now, after over a decade and seven albums, getting a little stale. Still Life, Opeth's fourth album, sits right in the middle of the group's timeline, and in many ways it's a peak.
review by Brandon Wu — 12-2-03 —
