Stoney

I listened to Mandylion for the first time today and I took the CD out of the stereo halfway through the second track.

Well, you say that metal hides emotions that are the hardest to uncover. I understand what you mean, but we also have to consider that apart from personal tastes and the emotions one can feel, which are subjective anyway, there’s a fact that metal has proposed very little originality for a long time, except for rare, rare exceptions. As far as I'm concerned, the emotions in metal have always seemed fake to me; the themes of metal have always come off as the usual two or three inserted into the usual contrived clichés: death, darkness, malice, depression... always treated in a very superficial and clumsy way. From my perspective, a Soundgarden song, which has half the sonic impact of a Pantera song, feels more violent because it instills unease and communicates discomfort and anger with two dissonant notes placed just right. It seems childish to express anger with guitars cranked to a thousand and sadness with syrupy arpeggios and minor melodies; it’s the most immediate thing to do, and anyone can do it. If I saw only this in Opeth, I obviously wouldn’t even consider them, but in them, I see much more, like the ability to carry on a musical discourse regardless of everything else. Their songs "work" even outside of a metal context, if you catch my drift. Their approach to music is different from that of the "classic" metalhead who picks up the guitar and worries about making a "killer riff"; the musical concepts behind are different, and the way they express themselves with their instruments, how they "make them talk," is different. The dynamics, the touch, the class, small attentions to detail, nuances, even the choice of tones, make them a decidedly atypical metal band. Take a song like Harvest, and listen to the expressiveness of the solo, the harmony that changes unexpectedly and non-trivially, the touch, the guitar sound with just a hint of distortion (not 15 kilos as is the norm in metal) that makes it sound so warm yet at the same time arid... There are very few metal guitarists who could pull off something like this; many probably lack the technical and expressive capabilities. Take a song like Windowpane from Damnation, I believe that a "typical" metalhead would never even remotely think of writing a piece like that; they probably wouldn't even know where to start because it's a way of expressing oneself that they don't know: the way the main theme is built, the structure of the piece, the drums' timing, the harmonic modulations... I repeat: we are on a completely different level; I don’t feel comfortable putting Opeth in the same container as the Gathering or, I don’t know, Cannibal Corpse or whoever else under the single label of "metal." Here we are truly on another planet...

Oh my God, an inferior race no, I can't go that far, but very often they're just fanatics with truly questionable critical abilities, since in one piece they consider only the technique and the sound impact, and they think melody is a "choice" (which, I continue to say, is laughable). In a musical piece, there are so many parameters and so many "choices" that one cannot even imagine, let alone reduce them to two or three. Unfortunately, there are "open-minded" metalheads, as Calus says, one in a million, and even if they listen to other genres, most of the time they still consider them inferior to metal, which is the "supreme genre" from which everything originates and from which one cannot deviate. Over the years, I've heard certain pearls of wisdom from metalheads that I don't think I've ever heard anyone else say; I could list some, but I'll refrain. I have come to think that a 12-year-old girl in love with Tiziano Ferro paradoxically has a higher chance of salvation because at least there's hope that she might change her mind as she grows up. I have arrived at these personal conclusions, which you will clearly find disagreeable or even outrageous, but this is my opinion. Of course, I’m not excluding the existence of exceptions; there might well be someone who understands classical music, jazz, funk, avant-garde electronic music, and also listens to metal, but surely they cannot call themselves a "metalhead." Regards.

Well, it is truly undeniable that the modern metal scene is filled with people who just make noise. In recent years, the production of extreme metal bands has skyrocketed, with brutal bands coming out of the USA one after another, differing only in terms of brutality and impact. This is regardless of whether they are liked or not. Beyond personal tastes, I believe anyone can notice that the innovation and originality of such bands now consist solely of how fast and violent they can play, and that's it. In such a landscape, very few bands stand out, and Opeth are, in my opinion, among them. The reason, I believe, is that their approach to music is not the typical one of extreme metal (death, gothic, I don’t even know what it’s called, but it’s just an empty definition) that characterizes many other bands. They, unlike many, are first and foremost complete musicians, and then metal musicians; whereas many others are limited to just metal and find themselves trapped in the patterns and clichés of their genre, which unfortunately have been the same for decades.

It's irrelevant. They might have started with metal, but they certainly didn't stop there. The point was quite simple: a record like this one (and the ones that followed) cannot be made if you’ve only ever played metal. You can tell these are people with experience and education behind them, and in fact, I read somewhere that for example, the drummer started by studying Latin-American music, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with death metal. Furthermore, anyone who knows Damnation and has listened to it attentively knows (if they noticed) that the way that record is played reveals an approach to the instruments that has nothing to do with metal. I'm very sorry, but Opeth are 10 kilometers above the average of the metal musicians currently out there, and dismissing their music as "melodic death metal" or something similar seems rather limiting to me.

The problem is that Opeth have NOTHING metal about them except for the distorted guitars; for everything else: they do NOT make stupid music, they are NOT incompetent, they have a distinctive style, they know how to create an atmosphere, they play expressively. The sad fact is that they are revered by die-hard metalheads who, used to thousands of incompetent, ignorant, and identical bands, cry miracle at the mere sound of half a melody. Probably, if they had only released albums like Damnation, metalheads wouldn’t have even given them a glance, because they can only hear the growl, the fast guitars, and the double bass. Reading sentences like "Like The Gathering, Opeth have long chosen the path of melody, utilizing the dusty sound of acoustic guitars" makes my skin crawl. It seems that melody is a choice when in fact it is the norm; it seems that Opeth are good because they play melodies instead of just noise, when this is "level 0," the bare minimum. Sure, in a music world where Gorgoroth and Deicide are listened to, I realize that even melody can become a "surprise element," which really says a lot about the average metalhead’s critical ability. Appreciating Opeth for being "melodic" or for "using acoustic guitars" is like being amazed by warm water. Unfortunately for metalheads, behind their music there is really so much more; an album like this could NEVER have been conceived by the mind of a metal musician, no matter how good they are: here we are dealing with people who have musical culture, who know how to play rock, jazz, and blues BEFORE playing metal, and this should at the very least make one think... And I’m sorry, but I truly don’t believe a metalhead can fully understand the class and skill of these truly exceptional musicians.

If I had to write a review for this stunning masterpiece, I would have used the same words. The same emotions, the same "mood," the same declared impossibility of being objective (because this record changes you, it takes your breath away and leaves you speechless, you can't be objective). I would have emphasized the same details, the melancholy, the lump in your throat that you can't help but feel while listening to any of the tracks on this album. Opeth have managed to translate into music the very essence of distant memories, the feeling of time flowing, the blurred outlines of memories faded into the fog. One of the most beautiful and delicate albums I have ever heard, to which I will be forever linked just like the memories it evokes. More than an album, an experience. Of course, both the rating of the album and that of the review should not be considered the result of anything objective, but I do not feel like delving into technical matters; for a record like this, I want to make an exception.

Wait, wait, I hadn’t read it well: "We Italians have an innate ability to misjudge artistic phenomena. Full of pride for our Renaissance, classicism, and Giosuè Carducci, we tend to mock true talent, stifling it, and after casting aside artists with good potential, we wait for history to retrace its steps to reevaluate them (our times range from 30 to 200 years and beyond). We have done this with Giorgio Gaber, Pierpaolo Pasolini, and we will do it with Oriana Fallaci just like with many other intellectuals." I believe this sentence speaks for itself; there’s no sense in even replying, it would be too easy.

Madonna... every bit of this is a walk on stilettos over my balls. How can anyone like it?

You are getting stuck in a nonsensical and dead-end conversation. Musical culture is a serious matter, and it is the domain of those who study it, not of the listeners, no matter how passionate they may be, who populate a site like this. The discourse is actually very simple; I try to present it from a different perspective. What primiballi and similar figures keep repeating, namely that Vasco is great because "he makes us have fun and makes us sing together," is precisely what I detest. I know plenty of people who have never read Vasco's lyrics but only remember the chorus (even when it's wrong) to sing along in unison. They have never even noticed the grammatical errors in the lyrics because, in the end, what does it matter? The important thing is to sing, have fun, even without understanding anything, because, as primiballi says, there's nothing wrong with that. But for me, this shutting down of the brain to have fun, this categorical rejection of even the most basic thought "because we have to have fun" (so why be sophisticated? A simple tune and a hastily thrown together text are fine too) is bothersome because it actually underlies a very different discourse, which usually serves to justify the ignorance of people who idolize artists of little value because that's the maximum they can understand. After all, the trend today is this: instead of studying, informing oneself, and trying to understand things that are unknown and incomprehensible, the cultural level is lowered to one’s own, so that everyone can magically become an expert in something without doing anything. In plain words, it’s gilding the turd so that everyone can feel rich and important; then, if someone objects, there are even those brave enough to say that knowing how to pass off a turd as gold is an art, and those who do it deserve to be respected as artists. It's a matter of perspectives...