Opeth
Blackwater Park

THE REVIEW

"Blackwater Park" as a title magnificently captures the entire atmosphere that permeates the album in question. "Black waters" that envelop and drag the individual down, into a catalog of subjective and intimate emotions, can only leave the listener speechless.

Here, Opeth have decided to give the best of what they have ever written and put into music. From "The Leper Affinity", to the initial cornerstone "Bleak", from "Harvest" to "Blackwater Park", it's a continuous advance, a journey, a moment of fear, recovery, enchantment, and, once again, being enveloped in a sound castle that is hardly categorizable, hardly at all, if you think of compartmentalizing Opeth. Opeth are just themselves and their music, any label you want to attach to them, any affirmation in that sense is merely a palliative that remotely conveys the idea of what these Swedes manage to perpetuate. And perhaps, it's not just my "original" opinion. The most touching episodes that intertwine, appear, and disappear in each song can only make the listener reflect, can only make them close their eyes to animate them with a blurred and distant light, perhaps barely perceptible, with the strange sensation that it exists, but it's not obvious, not overt. And masterpieces like this, allow me to say, know well what they are aiming for.

Between episodes of caustic brutality, like certain passages of "Bleak" or "The Drapery Falls" or "The Funeral Portrait", to melancholic and refined melodic poignant hints, as with "Harvest", among intricate and progressive sound architectures with references to jazz and an incredibly erudite musical avant-garde, to the pure glacial and morbid spirit of "Swedish Metal"; this is, in a few words, "Blackwater Park".

All of this is and represents Opeth, better. It's useless to wonder "what they are" and "what they do", it's more intelligent instead to penetrate their universe and their sounds, to let oneself be bewitched, completely enchanted and infected by a brutal and murderous yet pleasant disease; a sweet torture that requires the necessary attitude and growing passion for things wrapped in the fog of memories and disillusionments.
But so much more, that is entrusted however to each person's subjectivity, can be understood and deduced from a work like this, perfect from any point you wish to observe and analyze it from, and it's not just my demagogy. Anyone who listens to the album, without the detestable habit of wanting to bring down famous and well-to-do bands, just because of that, can objectively "not define it", not "place" it in any compartment, managing, only and if ever, to build for oneself a blurred and distant archetype, yet fascinating, that is theirs and no one else's; and I, who have been listening to Opeth for a long time, and appreciate all their albums, with this I just wanted to take a journey "by emotions", even if generic, on a magnificent work that so many people have helped to dream, and for this, I thank Opeth and their music.