DAMNATION

Damnation contains a lot of great music, but there's a huge problem with it. The album really goes nowhere.There is no adventurousness found on the album. While the songs are great, they are all pretty much the same, with the exception of "Closure", which contains some excellent drumming and energetic acoustic and clean electric guitars. However, even though it appears midway through the album, it fails to stir anything new up.

The overall sound can be described as almost entirely acoustic. There are mellotron/synth backgrounds that create a great melancholy atmosphere. Of course, the atmosphere is almost entirely the same throughout the whole album with extremely little variation, and the production sounds almost sterile since everything is so clean. Akerfeldt's clean vocals are excellent as always, and again there are no death growls to put variation on any of the songs. What also makes the album incredibly boring is the completely predictable song structures. Each song is the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus form, emphasizing how much of a chore this album is to listen to.

Trying to focus on the positives isn't hard though. There's always the popular Opeth show standard "In My Time of Need" which is familiar with most who have heard of the band. "Closure", as said before, is an excellent song which does its best to bring any energy into the rest of the album. Although after its over nothing really changes, it is a huge highlight. Also notable is the instrumental "Closing Credits", while sounding pretty much the same as the rest of the album, it's good to have a small break from Akerfeldt's familiar vocals.

Overall, I would not reccomend this to any people either looking to get into Opeth nor would I reccomend it to Opeth fans expecting a great album. It's boring listening to it in its entirety, and there really isn't anything that gives it a masterpiece status.