DAMNATION

Being an Opeth fan, I waited impatiently for this album. I heard rumors of it being an entirely acoustic album, a unique representation in the Opeth discography. Every Opeth fan knows Mike has a thing with mellow parts comprised into a sandwich with exploding death growls - exactly the reason why I started listening to Opeth in the first place - but an entire album made from exclusively calm parts? Makes you wonder... However, as soon as I heard the opening track (''Windowpane''), I knew Opeth was again riding the road to inovation. Such soft, calm and mellow, yet at the same time evil music I have experienced never before. The 43 minutes were over in a blink of an eye, leaving me with one of the most philosophical moods of my life. Of course, Damnation is an album to itself, a monolith composition, unique masterpiece in the sea of Opeth's releases - to someone who hasn't studied Opeth's earlier work. This, seventh Opeth's album, is to be understood in contrast to the previous album - the 2002 masterpiece Deliverance, with which it build sort of a ''pair'' of albums. Whilst Deliverance speaks of physical torture and death as sort of a man's savior to suffering, Damnation is concentrated to the opposite - psychotic raptures of a tortured mind. ''Deliverance'' is a paradox; it claims that death is our liberator, our Deliverance, and that it can free us from the clutches of this world. ''Damnation'', however, is all about the afterlife - the suffering of the soul, and because the soul is immortal, that kind of suffering is eternal. It is our - Damnation.

As for the arrangements, apart from acoustic guitars and strings keyboard effects, a fair part of Hammond organ may be heard. Mike uses delay and echo a lot on this album, it gives you sort of an ambiental touch. Steven obviously contributed to this album a lot - Porcupine Tree fans, dig in as well!

As much as I love this album, I need to say that it's not in the top 3 of my favourite Opeth albums (Morningrise, Still Life, Blackwater Park), yet I believe it deserves the top score.