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Rating:
Where can I start to review this new album by the Swedish geniuses Opeth? I would certainly begin by clarifying the 3 out of 5 rating that appears. Much can be said about Opeth, who are undisputed masters and professional musicians who have (fortunately) managed to move away from technique for technique's sake, focusing more on increasingly emotional music.
You could say they are perhaps the band that has best captured Canterbury's progressive essence and incorporated it into a death metal framework without clashing or offending either genre. For me, with this "Ghost Reveries," Opeth have finished climbing the peak and are now on a slight downward slope. I can say they are among my favorite bands, achieving that status with just a couple of albums that stick in your mind for a lifetime like "Morningrise" and "Still Life," followed by the excellent "Blackwater Park" and the more than good "experimental" pair Deliverance-Damnation. This is perhaps why the rating... they have already achieved the sublime for me.
From the very first notes of "Ghost Of Perdition," it seems like a vague "The Moor." The idea of incorporating flutes clearly reminiscent of masters like King Crimson, Camel, and Caravan is great, but it feels all too much like the song seems to hail from the shores of "Deliverance." Even in the following songs, the album leaves the impression that our musicians during the songwriting stage may have often said: "let's try to stop the song because I wouldn’t know how to continue it best; let's try to insert a syncopated break like "The Drapery Falls" or "Deliverance"". And if they didn't say that, it's what I fully grasped from listening to the entire album. The following "Beneath The Mire" too much has the air of being a mix of "Moonlapse Vertigo" and "Night Of The Silent Water" even though the game played by the keyboard slightly "hides" the self-plagiarism.
But is the album this much of a flop? Then why was it rated 3 and not 0? I would wonder that too. The fact is, the album starts off really badly for me but rises sharply with the last songs. "Atonement" and "Reverie/Harlequin Forest" are excellent examples of what the band should have pursued, in my opinion. "Atonement" seems like the song that was supposed to give a positive turn to the perhaps overly nebulous "Damnation." The following "Harlequin Forest" is perhaps the song that was missing in "Blackwater Park" to make it one of the most beautiful prog albums ever; this song even if it drops a bit around 10 minutes because of those "famous syncopated times to catch the song again" is one of the most beautiful songs of the album and continues entirely in pure "Blackwater Park-Still Life" atmosphere.
We come to the first of two songs that make the entire album purchase worthwhile. "Hours of Wealth" steals the first minute from "Talk To The Wind" by King Crimson before landing in one of the most beautiful arpeggios written by Opeth in their entire discography, and perhaps the entrance of the keyboard, which I so criticized the first time, enhances the song even more; a great Michael sings with bluesy vocalizations and excellent guitar phrasing truly noteworthy. And unfortunately how it pains me to hear such a beautiful song at the beginning of a song that for me clashes a lot with the previous one and the next. "The Grand Conjuration," apart from having a bad title, starts off badly and recovers not very well as it progresses. Fortunately after 10 plus interminable minutes of a "mediocre" song follows the last song on the album, the second that along with "Hours Of Wealth" makes the album worthwhile. Again King Crimson reign supreme, but obviously if you're making progressive how can you not bring with you the influences of that wonderful band that set the standard for everyone? "Isolation Years" is a dream, a song that cradles you, an excellent lullaby; the most atmospheric song made by Opeth that, however, doesn't stray at all from their past productions.
In conclusion, the record in question is not a bad album, it's on a par with the yearly releases and notably above the average of metal releases. Simply, Opeth have lost themselves a bit along the way and tried to look back and remember the masterpieces they penned years ago. For me, the album starts off terribly, rises significantly in the middle, then falls again at the end to leave a closing hope. For Opeth fans, it will be a masterpiece, for an Opeth and prog fan like me, it is simply an album that could have been better.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Ghost of Perdition (10:29)
Ghost of Mother
Lingering death
Ghost on Mother's bed
Black strands on the pillow
Contour of her health
Twisted face upon the head
Ghost of perdition
Stuck in her chest
A warning no one read
Tragic friendship
Called inside the fog
Pouring venom brew deceiving
Devil cracked the earthly shell
Foretold she was the one
Blew hope into the room and said:
"You have to live before you die young"
Holding her down
Channeling darkness
Hemlock for the Gods
Fading resistance
Draining the weakness
Penetrating inner light
Road into the dark unaware
Winding ever higher
Darkness by her side
Spoke and passed her by
Dedicated hunter
Waits to pull us under
Rose up to its call
In his arms she'd fall
Mother light received
And a faithful servant's free
In time the hissing of her sanity
Faded out her voice and soiled her name
And like marked pages in a diary
Everthing seemed clean that is unstained
The incoherent talk of ordinary days
Why would we really need to live?
Decide what is clear and what's within a haze
What you should take and what to give
Ghost of perdition
A saint's premonition's unclear
Keeper of holy hordes
Keeper of holy whores
To see a beloved son
In despair of what's to come
If one cut the source of the flow
And everything would change
Would conviction fall
In the shadow of the righteous
The phantasm of your mind
Might be calling you to go
Defying the forgotten mortals
Where the victim is the prey
02 The Baying of the Hounds (10:41)
I hear the baying of the hounds
In the distance. I hear them devouring
Pest-ridden jackals of the earth
Diabolical beasts and roaming the forests
In wait and constant protectors
Calling you to sit by his side
Your self-loathing image in his flesh
A revelation upon which you linger
His words are flies
Swarming towards the true insects
Feasting on buried dreams
And spreading decay upon your skin
His eyes spew forth a darkness
That cut through and paralyze
Casts light upon your secrets
Forced to confront your enemies
His mouth is a vortex
Sucking you into it's pandemonium
Fools you with a helping hand of ashes
Reached out in false dismay
His body is a country
The cities lay dead beyond despair
Friends turned enemies unable to come clean
In a rising fog of reeking death
Everything you believed is a lie
Everyone you loved is a death-burden
So you take comfort in him
And you are receptive to stark wishes
No longer struggling to declare your stand
You would inflict no harm to others
They are unaware and in a loop of futile events
You are everything, they are nothing
Drown in the deep mire
With past desires
Beneath the mire
Drown desire now with you
Lined up verses on dead skin
The tainted lips of a stranger
Resting upon hers
And I embrace bereavement
Everything beloved is shattered anyway
I would devote myself to anyone
I would accept any flaws
I am too weak to resist
Tension vibrating with horror
Finding the outcast in my eyes
Pushing nerves on a puppet
Endless poison in my veins
Clean intent now tainted with death
And so, cold touch now inhumane
Every waking hour
Awaiting a reverie to unfold
Louder by the minute
The baying of the hounds
Calling me back to my home
03 Beneath the Mire (07:57)
Haunted nights for halcyon days
Can't sleep to the scraping of his voice
Nature's way struck grief in me
And I became a ghost in sickness
Willingly guided into heresy
Beneath the surface, stark emptiness
And you'd pity my conviction
Whereas I thought of myself as a leader
You'd cling to your pleasant hope
It is twisted fascination
While I'd ruin the obstacles into despair
And I'm praising death
Lost love of the heart
In a holocaust scene memory
Decrepit body wearing transparent skin
Inside, the smoke of failure
Wept for solace and submit to faith
In his shadow I'm choking
Yet flourishing
Master
A delusion made me stronger
Yet I'm draped in pale withering flesh
I sacrificed more than I had
And left my woes beneath the mire
04 Atonement (06:28)
Clear the fog that was veiled around me
And blurred my sights
Suddenly, I'm no longer aching
To honor my plights
Rising moon and my skin is peeling
Past undone
Suddenly, I can't justify
What I had become
06 Hours of Wealth (05:20)
Found a way
To rid myself clean of pain
And a fever that's
Been haunting me
Has gone away
Looking through my window
I seem to recognise
All the people passing by
But I'm alone
And far from home
Nobody knows me
Never heard me say goodbye
Never shall I speak to anyone again
All days are in darkness
And abiding my time
Once I am sure of my task I will rise
Again...
07 The Grand Conjuration (10:21)
Majesty
Faithful me
Pour yourself
Into me
Wield your power
Martyr's price
Stare me down
To the ground
The eyes of the devil
Fixed on his sinners
Slake my thirst
Eternal wealth
Heathen key
Round my neck
This poetry
Our blasphemy
Know the sounds
Of infamy
The hands of Satan
Assembling his flock
Pale horse rider
Searching the earth
Whispered conjuration
A belief takes form
Choking hand tapping
The veins in your throat
His orders in your mouth
A decree for domination
Beneath the tides of wisdom
Spins the undertow of hate
Injected seeds of vengeance
Usurper's eyes of the powerless
Clean path to his kingdom
Beckoning in the mist
The grand conjuration
Tell me why
Love subsides
In the light
Of your wish
Say my name
Ease the pain
Clear the smoke
In my head
08 Isolation Years (03:51)
There's a sense of longing in me
As I read Rosemary's letter
Her writing is honest
Can't forget the years she's lost
In isolation
She talks about her love
And as I read
"Die alone"
I know she's aching
There's a certain detail seen here
The pen must have slipped to the side
And left a stain
Next to his name
She knows he's gone
And isolation
Is all that would remain
"The wound in me is pouring out
To rest on a lover's shore"
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Other reviews
By HenryChinaski1
Opeth’s new emanation stands as one of their absolute best releases, and perhaps as THE album of the year 2005.
Make it yours, whatever your musical background may be. You will not regret it.
By malamela
The tributes Opeth made on this CD to Tool and early Dream Theater works is too much, and not justified.
To define it in a few words: Predictable, already heard, nothing new.
By dying_sun
Paradoxically, after only two songs, your skin already starts to quiver: you look around, search for glances that aren’t there, hear footsteps among the gray shadows.
It is undoubtedly heterogeneous yet profoundly logical, it’s a haunted cell after an hour of freedom, a spectral moon after a sunny day.
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The sparkling melancholy burns in the sounds of guitars with dark distortions, the caresses of keyboards in the darkness of November nights.
The singer is alone, cries with piercing rage but simultaneously delights with notes of never forgotten purity.
