Still Life

This record is an amazing arrangement, a perfect ensemble of death, progression and blues. You need to listen to this album non-stop from “The Moor” to “White Cluster”, here Opeth really do explore the boundaries of Death metal. There is always an album in the career of every artist which defines them and forms the cornerstone of their music. With "Still Life" Opeth has pushed the creativity beyond all the levels of sanity and elevates their benchmark to the heights of near impossible emulation.

This record actually transcends the normal decorum of mathematics, here high (means progressive) and low (means death) mixed together is not a NULL, Akerfeldt must have been simultaneously strung up on Alcohol and grass when he wrote and composed Still Life. Mind you “Still Life” does not have the *I got struck by lightning* kind of an effect ( Checkout "A Celebration of guilt” by Arsis or "Chaosphere" by Meshuggah to know more about that effect). This record methodically seeps into every iota of musical nerves inside your human body and gets ingrained there. I have been listening to this band for over three years now, Still Life is the high point and Ghost Reveries is the trough of the Opeth discography.

This band got progressively refined with each record and the pinnacle of that evolution is a sound like "Still Life", it has an immense feel to it which melts and perfectly inter-blends the dark deathly growls and deathly progressive riffs with bluesy folk acoustic melody and clean vocals. "Still Life" is a real musical analogy to Speedball, which is a deadly cocktail of heroin and cocain. In other words the songs simultaneously stimulates and depresses your brains.

The beauty of "Still Life" torment is beyond the comprehension of any human brains, the lyrics are mostly grim and when this is combined with the vocals creates an ambiance of a cold winter morning spend retrospecting about the lost life. Its illegal to make music this inscrutable, its painful to exist when you cannot understand how melancholy "Benighted" can effortlessly transition into an aggressive "Moonlapse Vertigo" ending in a mournfully poetic "Face Of Melinda". When the guitar slowly fades, you wonder can it get any better, just like how Akerfeldt says in "Serinity Painted Death", I can feel there is a beautiful pain in "Still Life".

There are still traces of early black metal influence of Opeth in the last two tracks, otherwise the record mostly stick to good progressive death and progressive metal. One of the high points of this record is the quality of the riffs which literally forms the back bone of the more heavy tracks, here they have truly improvised enough to totally come out of the shadow of NWOBHM inspired music. Compared to their early works, Still Life has lot more of clean vocals, acoustic guitar and integrate even more number of transitions between the multitude of textures they exhibit. This was also a quantum leap in terms of production quality and this record can perfectly satiate the musical appetite of any progressive metal fanatic.

This is a long pending review, i have never dared to write about “Still Life” , my vocabulary prowess can never do justice to such a complex form of musical expression. I am deeply infatuated with "Still Life" and if I continue writing about this then it is going to be a cavalcade of cliches which I have hopefully refrained from till now.