Opeth
My Arms, Your Hearse

THE REVIEW

Opeth is a band that has made their very unique sound a trademark. A blend of death guitars, progressive motifs, melodic parts alternating with metal lashes, all spiced up with the magnificent clean and growl voice of the leader Mikael Akerfeldt. This mixture generates the so-called Opeth style, unique and unmistakable.

After their raw debut (Orchid) and the subsequent excellent Morningrise, they dive into creating a concept album, which means a work centered on a single theme (as is the subsequent Still Life). The story at the core of the album is a quite unsettling ghost story, excellently written (the lyrics are incredible!) and masterfully arranged.

Highlighting the uniqueness of the album's theme, the whole record is much more homogeneous and, at the same time, "harder" than the previous ones, offering the listener little room for the nevertheless inevitable acoustic parts. Here the death soul of Opeth finally surfaces, gifting us with the most intense (and massive) album created by Akerfeldt's band. Songs like Deamon of the Fall (Mikael's growl is incredible), or When (perhaps the best song on the album that, after a mini acoustic intro, stuns you with an inhuman scream accompanied by an ultrasonic drum), not to mention April Ethereal and in general all the songs of this ghost-concept, are here to prove it.

In conclusion, this turns out to be the most metal album of Opeth and, it must be admitted, when they want to, our guys can really be fierce.

So: excellent sound + excellent lyrics + great story = magnificent album! (for me their best)

The last gem is the titling of the tracks. The name of each track ends up being the last word of the previous song, giving the idea of a single narrative (even in the booklet, the lyrics are written without interruption, as if it were a story, which indeed it is!).