ALBUM OF THE MONTH>FIRST CLASS
OPETH
Deliverance
Music For Nations
It's said, in journalism, the more one uses superlatives, the more the one takes away their potency. So as I sit here, clutching in my sweaty palm a press sheet laden with shamelessly obsequious quotations from Kerrang! and Metal Hammer (who have, respectively, proclaimed Opeth to be "the most unique band on the planet" and "probably the best band in the world"), I find myself in a difficult position. If words were weapons, it'd be like going to raid the great journalists' armoury only to find that everything more powerful than a strong rubber and folded-up piece of A4 has been used up.
So we can assume that supracosmic praise for the sixth Opeth album is taken as read? We could even make it fun. Interactive Terrorizer. Fill in your own gushing review with your favourite words: "The new Opeth album is _______, especially the _______, which is/are even more _______ than before." If 'Blackwater Park' floored you like it should have, you'll be employing someone to remove the teeth-marks from your rug again when you hear 'Deliverance', even if arguably 'Blackwater Park' was a hungrier, more wounded beast. Opeth clearly feel that, since 'Still Life', their standard formula is perfected and has enough mileage in it to be followed through one more time here (down to details like the third track always being the acoustic one), a feeling which is, of course, entirely understandable (why change what you're doing when, every time you put a record out, metal writers virtually clamber over each other's feverish bodies in insane bloodshot awe to yank down your pants and fellate you on the spot?). But even if the forward momentum of Opeth's sound has diminished in favour of greater self-reference, they're still a riff machine of formidable proficiency, constinency, distinct personality and integrity, and as we all know are more than capable of weaving these nonpareil riff structures into real songs, y'know real songs, like grown-ups listen to. It's one thing to make a string of albums which all sound familiar, but quite another to have been the only band to have ever come up with the idea of that sound, execute it with the care, precision and affection it deserves, and remain at the top of the game you wrote the rules for, leaving the few bands who presume to follow in your wake looking like grubby peasants gnawing on greasy bones underneath your banquet table. (April Ethereal? No thanks.) Opeth almost ram this point home by casually tossing in a three-and-a-half-minute jam at the end of 'Deliverance's title track which not only sounds like it was played by one gargantuan brain through four pairs of arms, but proves that they don't even need any more than four chords to pull off a masterstroke of tension/release, rhythmically perplexing brain-surgery-by-CD.
I say all this, of course, knowing perfectly well that the next Opeth album, 'Damnation', which is already recorded and will be out next Spring, is a collection of 'mellower', more acoustic tracks which has no choice but to form the sharpest contrast yet between two consecutive albums from this much-loved band and plunge us all right back into marvelling at Opeth's dextrous, evolving vision. Where they'll go from that point is anybody's guess, but for now all you need to know is that 'Deliverance' contains few surprises (as if the very existence of Opeth in the first place isn't one of the biggest surprises in metal), but that that should be viewed as its greatest strength rather than any form of shortcoming.
[9] James "Harry" Hinchliffe
Terrorizer#105, dec2002
