Review Summary: She didn’t sleep with me after I played “The Drapery Falls” for her and I haven’t talked to a therapist about it yet.
Opeth has meant a lot to me throughout the years. They were my high school darlings, the master craftsmen of heavy metal, and the first discography I ever fully owned (and consequently fell behind on after Sorceress bored me senseless). Now, I listen to their music once-a-year at most. Something about remembering every note before it plays kills the magic of a band, even one as capable as Opeth. Still, a cold November morning seems the perfect time to return to an old favorite and examine it anew, particularly since something has always seemed off about Blackwater Park to me. Unlike Still Life, My Arms, Your Hearse, or even the patchy Ghost Reveries, Blackwater Park never felt like a classic, which is strange, because, at this point, it is a seminal metal album. This review will be from the perspective of a long-time fan, and thus I speak about the band in ways that someone who really isn’t familiar with Opeth may not relate to easily. If you haven’t heard Blackwater Park, go listen to it, it’s pretty awesome. If you have, I want to talk about some things that have been bothering me from the first listen of this album up until now.
With so much already explored, the little teases of strange, unbarred ideas the band offers are the most tantalizing aspects of Blackwater Park after all these years. The increasing cacophony of noise looming behind the t/t as it roars into its final moments, Martin Mendez and his bass swelling over the mournful chords inaugurating “The Drapery Falls,” and the peppy solo piercing the gloom of “The Leper Affinity” add character to the atmospheric walls of death metal Opeth spend most of their time wallowing in. “Bleak” in particular stands above much of the material here. Like all of Opeth’s best songs, it uses unique passages, such as Mikael’s short, jazzy solo and the ferocious climax, to puncture and deflate purposefully repetitive song-structures. The four minutes of death metal that precede Steven Wilson’s first chorus build an eerie tension that perfectly complements a catchy hook, yet such songwriting tactics risk leaving anyone by the Bungliest of listeners wincing from whiplash. Thus, the simultaneous necessity for the muzak calm bridge to rejuvenate the listener and readjust their mood. Where we enter the first chorus from the paranoid and raging, the second chorus explodes from a heart-wrenching melody. The relentless violence of the final forty-five seconds feels earned by the deep grief preceding it, and perfectly compliments the emotional journey of the lyrics which, as far as I can tell, is about strangling a young woman over an affair.
The remainder of Blackwater Park shines similarly when its story-telling coincides with the dynamics of the music. Violent mental machinations fit best behind the most devious riffs conjured here (the midsection of “The Funeral Portrait” is particularly effective, if noticeably similar to the midsection of back-album banger “Serenity Painted Death” from their prior release, Still Life), while slower moments like “Harvest” and “Portraits of Ivy” both deflate the listener and draw emotion from them. Much has been written in praise of the Opethian interplay, the dynamic between soft acoustics and raging metal their music is known for, and Blackwater Park is the exemplar of this style. The majority of its 67-minute runtime is spent between one extreme or the other, and while the truly magnificent moments occur at the interchanges and interplays of these stylings, my issues with the album mainly arise when I think about what they spend most of Blackwater Park doing. Blackwater Park is at its weakest when the wallowing walling pays little dividends and wallows without will. While all of the songs have memorable moments, most of them could also stand to lose a minute in editing, while the worst offenders could lose three or four. The album is chock-full of genius ideas, yet it consistently hides these ideas behind songs that are overlong and uninteresting outside of disparate moments. “The Funeral Portrait” is largely forgettable outside its aforementioned midsection due to unnecessary repetition. If it were only six minutes long it would be a more impactful song, but instead it fixates on a riff that just isn’t brutal enough. “Dirge For November” does nothing wrong, yet outside of several charming chord choices in the intro I feel no need to return to it. It does flow nicely within the structure of the album, but the midsection is simply too plodding and depressing for a neurotypical feller like me to get down to on the daily. Finally, while the t/t is one of my favorite Opeth songs, it’s also one of the most infuriating. It begins with one of the heaviest riffs Opeth have ever penned, which builds into a stupendous, reckless momentum before crashing into a wall of atmospheric meandering. Three minutes of the most boring, repetitive atmospheric buffoonery ever engaged in. It accomplishes nothing but killing the momentum of the song and wasting the listener’s time. “Portraits of Ivy” just played, we just got an acoustic break. Or, better yet, just use “Portraits of Ivy” as the interlude in the t/t! It is a frustrating moment that I always fast-forward over tucked within a fermenting torrent of death metal goodness.
After so many years with Blackwater Park, the frustrating moments begin to add up. They say we spend one and a half years of our lives on the toilet, but how much of my life have I spent on that damned t/t interlude? Can I really dedicate eighteen minutes of my life to the back half of Blackwater Park every time I listen to it? Maybe I should just put “Bleak” on a playlist and forget about the rest… These and other thoughts now torture me at night while death hurtles towards me and every album is one less choice to make before oblivion. The most prescient question, then, is whether Blackwater Park has been respectful of the time I’ve wasted worshiping it. On close examination, I don’t entirely believe it has. A third of the album is pretty forgettable, and the majority of these forgettable moments are attached to the back-half of the album. The stuff that works does work really well, obviously, but Blackwater Park indulges formulaic songwriting in ways that, twenty years after the release of this seminal album, hint at the left-turn Opeth would take just ten years afterwards with Heritage. Where Still Life and My Arms, Your Hearse had freer songwriting to accommodate storytelling, Blackwater Park saw Opeth perfect a formula, for both their future good songs and bad songs. In more ways than one, “Wreath”, which is my choice for the worst classic Opeth song, mimics “The Funeral Portrait.” “Heir Apparent” and “Ghost of Perdition” both follow the blueprint of “The Leper Affinity” to rousing success. “Harvest” was the already most lenient follower yet of Opeth’s formula for the obligatory acoustic track. And, finally, did they really think they could fool us into thinking “The Drapery Falls” and “A Fair Judgement” were different songs and not slightly-altered clones from the subsidization of riff production? More than anything, twenty years of distance on Blackwater Park makes me see Opeth’s songwriting reduced from a canvas to examine medieval stories of death, revenge and violence through, to a method with which to bring the masses Opeth branded metal music. It accomplishes all the motifs within a structure that at some point became insincere to Mikael, which is frankly hard to fault. All the traditionally Opeth albums after Blackwater Park sound like Blackwater Park. The good tracks ape the good songs on Blackwater Park, and the forgettable ones are usually attempts to reimagine something that didn’t work on Blackwater Park. For Opeth’s golden age, Blackwater Park was the crossing of the Rubicon. The cementation of Opeth as one of the fundamental bands to heavy metal sparked a stagnation only those who have achieved truly great things know, but what else could be expected? They made their mark, and the sun set over Blackwater Park.
