Quote:
Originally Posted by Chiefspants
It was a firm belief of mine that Led Zeppelin would probably be my favorite band until hair grew abundantly from my ears. I did not stop to ponder what a momentous day it was when my best friend sent me “In My Time of Need” By Opeth, from their Damnation album. I was surprised to find that the song sounded heavily influenced by pink floyd, and maybe even cut from the 70’s itself. My friend told me they played music mixed from 70’s style rock and current death metal.
After listening to only In My Time of Need during the fall months of highschool. I began to transition into some of their other music. It was then I discovered just how diverse Opeth was, after listening to the soft, melodic Harvest, the heavy, fast paced In Mist She was standing and a mixture of the two in A Fair Judgement, Even my parents became fans. (Though they didn’t care for their heavy stuff so much)
It was then my dad found the song Burden. Wow, this song moved my soul, Akerfeldts voice really reached a new level with this song. A song which is in my opinion, stairway to heaven worthy (Stairway has been one of my favorite songs for ages) The power, and emotion in Akerfeldts voice just blew me away.
Finally, Opeth is so much to who I am. Opeth truly moves my soul, their writing paints a captivating image within my mind and encompasses my soul in a celestial garden. They place my mind into a world where I can see everything so clearly and unblemished. It is a dream environment for me to write within. (Ever since I got serious into Opeth, My novel progressed from page 64 to 405 in only a year.)
After staying with their clean songs for about a year, I finally began to branch off into their heavier music. I downloaded their ghost reveries album on my seventeenth birthday, and "Ghost of Perdition" quickly became one of my favorite songs. I do not believe I have ever heard a song so brutally vigorous yet astonishingly beautiful at the same time. ( I then heard "Bleak" for the first time about a month later, and found that it too achieved this phenomenal feat.)
3,500 last.fm scrobbles later, Opeth is still by far my favorite band, I'm now refocusing on the heavier portions of their watershed album while revisiting Damnation. I do not know if I shall ever know another band so diverse, so daring, so wicked yet beautiful, and completely remarkable at all that they attempt.
I highly recommend this band for anyone who has any kind of a taste in music.
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Here's my Opeth story, also starting in high school: people online were telling me that this is an incredible band, that the singer has the best harsh vocals ever, that they are heavy and complex. So I downloaded
Damnation and
Deliverance simultaneously from a P2P client, song by song. The first song I played was Damnation's first track, "Windowpane." Now, I love prog-rock but I was waiting for the metal... and it never came. I didn't know then that the album was conceptually meant to be a mostly-acoustic album. The the first track off of
Damnation's companion album, the [mostly]all-heavy
Deliverance finished downloading. "Wreath" was complex, brutal punishment all the way through. The title track of the album showed me how masterful then-drummer Martin Lopez is. He plays a drum part near the end of the song that sounds impossible to the ears of a non-drummer: he's playing a complex counter-rhythm to what is going on with the guitars that sounds like it is taking every bit of his arms to play... until you listen closer and hear that he's somehow hitting the cymbal with some magical 3rd hand, keeping everything in a solid 4/4. It blows my shit away.
So when I got their most acclaimed album,
Blackwater Park, and heard on the song "Bleak" that those two sides of the band come together so majestically. I was completely sold then and there.
Still Life, my 3rd favorite album of any genre, all-time, made them my favorite band. "Serenity Painted Death" was so much fun and my favorite song by the band, "Godhead's Lament" has this perfectly-phrased folk interlude that sends me to happy places every time.
So, yeah, Opeth rule.