ORCHID

Although I previously hadn't "got" Opeth, I recently decided to give them another chance and thought the best way to do it was to give a listen to this debut album of theirs, on the basis that whilst it doesn't get as much praise as later works, it forms a foundation for their work and I might find a better way to unpack their sound if I track its development from here.

The album leads off with a clear statement of intent in the form of In Mist She Was Standing, in which a positively jaunty instrumental opening section gives way to a mingling of death metal aggression, vocals, and production style with prog- derived musicianship and compositional extravagance. In fact, but for two brief numbers (Silhouette and Requiem), the entire album consists of reasonably long multi-sectional compositions which find Opeth sketching out their initial vision of prog-death metal.

Indeed, it would be fair to say that whilst death metal might be the centre of gravity for the album as far as its metal contributions go, a broader palette of metal techniques are drawn on than just the standard death playbook, with some sections taking on a sort of epic majesty reminiscent of the more serious-minded types of power metal. And genuinely non-metallic sections appear too, with some gentle moments reminiscent of the most pastoral moments of early prog bands (think Anthony Phillips' acoustic guitar work on Genesis' Trespass as an example).

With Dan Swanö producing, it's hard not to see this as carrying forward some of the ideas originally explored by Edge of Sanity - though notably, Edge of Sanity's progressive magnum opus Crimson was not yet recorded when this was released, so perhaps it's better to say that there was a cross-fertilisation of ideas at work between the two groups. Either way, if you're into death metal and into prog and feel like you should like Opeth but have previously bounced off their mature works, it may be worth your while giving Orchid a listen, because this is the flower whose seeds grew Opeth's future harvests.