BLACKWATER PARK

Blackwater Park is in my opinion the best Opeth album (maybe alongside with Still Life and My Arms Your Hearse) and one of my all time favourites. All the tracks are awesome, and each one in a different way! The Leper Affinity and its evil riff starts the album greatly, using their typical alternation between heavy and soft parts, but everything with a very doomy and sometimes uncomfortable feeling. Bleak is the easiest song of the album, but it's still very good. Harvest is a mellow track with a strong melancholic atmosphere. In The Drapery Falls and Dirge For November we have again that unconfortable feeling, but much stronger here! Especially in Dirge For November the extreme contrast between the central heavy part and the ending create a very nice feeling of vacuum. The Funeral Portrait is an awesome death metal track, with a splendid ending; much people don't like this one and Dirge For November for not being very progressive, but I personally love them, the first for the feeling and the latter for the death metal brutality! Blackwater Park is another excelent track and closes the album greatly with the line Sick liaisons raised this momumental mark / The sun sets forever over Blackwater Park. Also, the bonus tracks of the special edition, Still Day Beneath the Sun and Patterns In The Ivy II, are really excelent mellow tracks, that could have been included in the regular edition of the album.

In its entirely the album is just a masterpiece; original and still very solid and emotional.