Review Summary: Put too many eggs in one basket, and you're bound to trip over a tree root and make one hell of a mess on your way to your final destination.
It's always pretty interesting, when discovering a band's discography, to see how they follow up what is often considered their magnum opus. Sure, there are lots of bands who have a string of back-to-back albums that are "magnum opuses" to a whole lot of different people- Iron Maiden and Metallica's respective 80s outputs, Yes and Judas Priest's respective 70s outputs, yada yada yada- and then there's bands who seem to have their whole career build up to one landmark album. In those cases, it's undeniably pretty harrowing too. And sure, I guess you could say that greatest album is subjective. In my case, my favourite Opeth album is one that people consider one of their weakest (
Watershed). But what makes
Blackwater Park such an important album for not just the band but also the progressive rock genre as a whole is that it's an album that opened a whole lot of doors. Ask many people whose first Opeth album was that particular one, myself included, why that album is important to them, and you'll get a lot of different answers. Some will say that it was a gateway to death metal and more extreme genres. Others will say it opened the door to the possibilities that prog has to offer. And what's particularly amusing for an album that bills itself as "progressive death metal" is just how accessible it is. Opeth have been one of the more reasonably accessible prog bands over the past few decades, so it's no surprise that such an album that's laid down a lot of possibilites for many people would be considered important.
It's also a pretty dangerous mindset, because it also creates the objective notion that anything that comes after can't possibly compare, and it becomes easy for bands to gain a lot of deluded ambition. In Opeth's case, the band were to release a double album that shows the two very extremes of their music. Said plan never came to fruition thanks to record label meddling, and the two volumes were released as two seperate albums; one being the "extreme" side known as
Deliverance, and the other, more relaxed and "progressive" side known as
Damnation. And almost hilariously, everyone and their mom preferred the latter. Despite
Deliverance sporting a 13-minute title track showcasing some of the band's most signature stuff, the whole album on its own sounds like the band getting cocky and putting all their eggs in one basket, only for the person carrying said basket to get their foot stuck in a tree root and drop the basket, shattering all the eggs.
There are a whole lot of reasons
Deliverance just plain doesn't work. The first can be detected just by looking at the back of the CD case; there's 6 tracks, almost all of them being over 10 minutes long. That isn't to say that Opeth haven't succeeded at that in the past; my second favourite album of theirs, after all, is
Morningrise, featuriing 5 tracks all over 10 minutes with one being a whopping 20. The difference is, Opeth understood, on that album, the importance of songwriting. And for the first half of the album, that seems to be somewhat apparent. "Wreath" starts the album off on a promising note, with a drumroll, a scream, a trippy yet heavy riff and Mikael's terrifying growls yanking you right into one hell of an unforgiving, heavy and brutal atmosphere. For the next 6 or so minutes, Mikael draws from some of the early black metal influences with his screams, ever changing tempos come in and out of the picture and we even get some rather melancholic riffs to provide an excellent contrast. However, this is also the point where we see the start of the album's biggest issue: pacing. at least two or so minutes of this track could be cut with little to no effect. Fortunately, the album's title track follows suit, and it's easily the best song on the album and probably one of the band's very best songs to date. Alternating between heavy and crushing, atmopheric and melancholy, tense and beautiful, this song is everything that classic Opeth is about in one beautiful, thirteen minute package. Particularly memorable is the song's haunting outro, where a crushingly heavy riff underscores a beautiful and melancholic one for four minutes, followed by the heavy riff itself being accented by two very haunting piano chords until the song abruptly stops. This outro could have been the song itelf, and I wouldn't have complained.
Sadly, this is also an indicator to just how top-heavy the album is. After that 13-minute mammoth, it's all downhill from here. The band break probably the biggest rule set by their earlier output: "never be uninteresting". From here on we get probably interesting parts of songs that make up probably half their lengths at best, but never good songs as a whole. As a wise man once said, there is such thing as too much of a good thing, and that's probably the perfect way to describe
Deliverance as a whole. Songs like "A Fair Judgment" have the potential to be gold-tier Opeth. For the first half of the song, it almost kind of does. After two crushingly heavy tunes, Mikael puts the growls away for a piano power ballad, and sadly, only the first half of the song is really worth your time. It pretty much just keeps going on and on until the song runs out of ideas.
In some ways,
Deliverance feels like a supergroup album. I say this, because most supergroup albums see pieces from other bands meeting together, pushing the record button, regurgitating whatever comes to mind until someone in the studio points to their watch and someone notices by sheer coincidence, that they're almost out of tape. That's the only thing that could really describe how unbearably dull songs like "Master's Apprentices" or "By the Pain I See in Others" came to mind. I've heard the former several times and can only remember the intro to save my life. It's not a particularly good intro either; the mid-tempo riff that rolls out is incredibly dull and lifeless, the blastbeat is downright unnecessary and Mikael's growls that ensue sound strained, and even robotic, like he's just reading the words off a paper. There's no atmosphere to be found in this song, no nothing, no climax- it just plods and plods and
plods until the band starts to run out of tape and end the song on an incredibly dull note; that's not even beginning to describe how 70 percent of the song is just variations of its already dull main riff. And even the soft section, usually the best parts of the Opeth song, while admittedly pretty sounding, just sounds like stock Opeth. No jokes to be found here, you could literally switch this soft section out with literally any other soft section and nothing could be different. Fortunately, "By the Pain I See in Others" does shake things up a bit... it's a shame, though that this is wasted on a song whose most important aspect is its first half, and is followed by a pointless and completely predictable folky segment, and let's not even get started on that extremely annoying outro, consisting of a guitar note taking a decade to end, some silence, and two annoying backwards voice clips accompanied by equally annoying static and noise.
The production on the album doesn't fare well either. Steven Wilson isn't a perfect producer, sure, but even his few ever duds (Porcupine Tree's
Deadwing, for instance, but at least said album being the band's best album made up for that) sound better than
this. This is absolutely shocking for a Steven Wilson effort, as it's easily one of the most unprofessional sounding things I've ever head in my life. There's no dynamics to be found here, and the instrumentation sounds like it's split into two dominating halves: the guitars, vocals and bass all squashed together lifelessly while the drums dominate the other half. I got curious before writing this review, so I went and Wiki'd the album, and imagine my shock when I found out who did the mixing: Andy Sneap. That's right, Andy FUCKING Sneap, the Vlado Meller of heavy metal himself. It's shocking that Wilson would allow himself to associate with such an amateur whose mixes, 95 percent of the time, sound like the audio equivalent of plastic candy. This is even more shocking with the band's following effort,
Damnation, having Steven Wilson do literally everything on the production end of things (producing, engineering and mixing). Sure, Wilson is not necessarily a metal producer per se, but I'd rather hear him mix a metal album than someone who's known for copying and pasting his same EQ over and over for one of the most promising metal bands.
Deliverance is a failure, but it's an interesting one. No band is infallible, and Opeth certainly aren't excluded from that either (don't worry guys, I'll get around to ripping
Heritage a new asshole soon), but anyone who discovers bands' outputs via downloading torrents and listening to the albums one at a time will find themselves particularly amused and possibly perplexed. Sure, out of context, it's just another Opeth album; on its own it's Opeth doing what they'd already been doing for ten years up to that point, but in the bigger picture of things, while not being offensively bad, or radically different per se, it shows Opeth indulging way too much in the good aspects of their sound, to the point where it becomes overbearing. And sure, listening to it in the context of the 2016 re-release that puts both albums out together as a double album does help the experience, but it still shows exactly which of the two extremes that make up Opeth's classic years is going to come out on top when you pit them together in a death match at an arena.
