#3: OPETH – BLACKWATER PARK

July 2nd, 2009 at 5:00pm
Satan Rosenbloom

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21best1 blackwaterpark

We recently polled a wide array of musicians, managers, publicists, label reps, and writers from within the world of metal to find out what they thought the 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century So Far have been. Eligible albums were released between January 1, 2000 and April 1, 2009. Each panelist turned in a ballot, with their #1 album worth 21 points, their #2 album worth 20 points, and so on and so forth. The ballots are now in and we’ll be counting down one album a day until we reach #1. Today we present the #3 album, coming in with a total of 237 points…

Opeth, Blackwater Park (Music for Nations, 2001)
Mikael Åkerfeldt – Vocals/Guitars
Peter Lindgren – Guitars
Martin Mendez – Bass
Martin Lopez – Drums
Produced by Steven Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt

There is no metal band that traverses the chasm between beauty and brutality as confidently as Sweden’s Opeth. From their first album Orchid on through last year’s Watershed, Mikael Åkerfeldt and his bandmates have embraced the complexity and romanticism of 70s progressive rock, rejecting two of metal’s central tenets: it’s gotta be simple, and it’s gotta be ugly.

On the surface, Blackwater Park is prototypical Opeth – it folds acoustic and electric passages, furious blastbeats and 6/8 waltzes, clean tones and disharmony into lengthy suites, each one ornately detailed and flawlessly played. Pretty much any one of Opeth’s post-millennial opuses could have made it on this list (and another one did – check #10), so why does this one sit loftily at the #3 spot on this list?

Blackwater Park represented Opeth’s “Ah-ha!” moment, when all of their ambitious ideas crystallized into a set of back-to-back amazing songs, rendered in glorious Technicolor sound. The riffage on “Leper Affinity,” “Bleak” and the title track still rank among Opeth’s most thrilling; “Dirge for November” and the interlude “Patterns In the Ivy” feature some of the band’s most hauntingly spare music; a multi-tracked Åkerfeldt blazes through vocal harmonies on ”Harvest” and “The Funeral Portrait” like a death metal Boston.

Blackwater Park was Opeth’s best-sounding record to date, thanks largely to producer Steven Wilson, also the guitarist of ambient prog band Porcupine Tree. The mix is spacious and detailed, its acoustic and electric textures meshing and flowing beautifully. Wilson added depth to a set of songs that already existed in four dimensions. Sonically, musically and lyrically, it all came together on this one. Opeth have continued to follow their singular path to ever more intriguing places, but they’ve never cut a better record than Blackwater Park.

-SR