DAMNATION

Ahh, Opeth's noble experiment. Damnation turned out to be quite a tasty album with no obvious flaws. Opeth's lighter stuff has always been a gorgeous accent to their pulsing death metal, which made me worry initially that separating the two might lead to a lackluster performance, as the loss of contrast would be detrimental. Thankfully, I was wrong.

From the opening arpeggios of Windowpane till the mellow fading of Weakness, this album never really disappoints. In the interest of maintaining a high-contrast song structure, the band chose to mesh harshly dissonant picked lines against sweet chord strains. The effect is somewhat like consuming a nice wad of horseradish. There is pain, make no mistake. The pain is all-consuming, but given time, the pain clears into a wonderful celestial-choir-type feeling.

The only real complaint I can raise is that I had hoped for more acoustic work than was evinced by this recording. Morningrise, Still Life, and My Arms compete for the slot as my favorite Opeth album based on their wonderful acoustic work, so I had hoped for another contender. Instead, the album was filled primarily with a sweet-toned electric sound. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; I had just hoped to hear a much more unplugged sound.