Damnation [Digipak]

Opeth

Those who love Opeth for their storming death metal while loathing their prog-folk interludes should avoid Damnation like the plague. It turns out that 2002's Deliverance was so unutterably heavy because the band worked out most of their more pastoral sensibilities on Damnation, recorded at the same time. What's here is a complex and often acoustic album that proves beyond question Opeth's high regard for the sweet harmonies and post-psychedelic atmospherics of 70s rockers such as Camel, Steve Hackett and, especially, Barclay James Harvest.

This is not to say it's a retro album. For a start, those bands have been so comprehensively written out of rock history it's as if they never existed at all. Then there's the influence of Opeth's own pedigree. Steeped in the bloodier aspects of metal, singer Mikael Akerfeldt has no time for sweet love or fanciful flights of fantasy, instead remaining forever trapped in post-relationship depression, drowning in loneliness and regret. His voice, here never reduced to a satanic roar, drifts beautifully over and under the band's dark folk and hypnotic soft rock progressions, as chiming twin guitars, recalling Wishbone Ash, drop casually in and out. It's still intense and often moving--it just doesn't shout about it. --Dominic Wills