Opeth - Deliverance
On November 12, 2002, "Deliverance", the sixth studio album by the Swedish prog-death metal band "Opeth", was released.
The early 2000s placed "Opeth" at the pinnacle of progressive metal, but also on the brink of a creative and emotional abyss. After the huge success of 2001's masterpiece Blackwater Park, which catapulted the Stockholm quartet from an underground cult band to a leading force on the global scene, vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt found himself torn between two opposing musical poles. On the one hand, he was driven by a burning desire to push the band's progressive death metal to its most aggressive, technical and darkest extreme, while on the other, he had accumulated melancholic, quiet and undistorted songs influenced by his love of 1970s progressive rock. Åkerfeldt was concerned about releasing a completely soft album that would scare away the devout metal audience, until his close friend Jonas Renkse, lead singer of the band "Katatonia", offered him a bold solution: record two separate albums at the same time that would represent both sides of the band's coin. The record company Music for Nations initially refused to finance a double album for fear of financial losses, but agreed to allocate a single album budget to record the entire project and release it in two separate parts about five months apart, the first and heaviest of which is "Deliverance", and the second and quieter is the album "Damnation" released in April 2003.
But the ambitious decision to record two full albums on the budget and time of one turned the summer of 2002 into a continuous nightmare that the band itself later defined as the most difficult period in its history. When Åkerfeldt, guitarist Peter Lindgren, bassist Martin Mendez and virtuoso drummer Martin Lopez entered the Nacksving and Studio Fredman studios in Gothenburg on July 22, 2002, it turned out that Åkerfeldt had almost no finished songs for "Deliverance". With no choice, he was forced to write the music and lyrics at night, chain-smoking cigarettes and sleeping fitfully on the studio floor, and record them with the band during the day without prior rehearsals. As if the inhuman time pressure and the numerous technical problems in the outdated studio weren't enough, a severe personal tragedy befell Åkerfeldt when his beloved grandmother, who was the closest person to him, was killed in a car accident in the midst of recording. The heavy grief, anxiety, and mental exhaustion seeped into every note on the album, imbuing the songs with a claustrophobic, angry, and merciless atmosphere.
The bright spot that saved the recordings from complete collapse was the arrival of Steven Wilson, the leader of the band "Porcupine Tree", who returned to collaborate with the band as a co-producer alongside Åkerfeldt after the success of "Blackwater Park". Wilson not only gave Åkerfeldt artistic confidence in moments of crisis, but also contributed keyboards, piano, Mellotron and background vocals to the album that provide a chilling symphonic layer beneath the walls of distortion. At the end of seven grueling weeks of recording in September 2002, the recordings reached the renowned British producer and mixing engineer Andy Sneap at Backstage Studios in Derbyshire, England. Sneap managed to extract from the chaos of the recordings a razor-sharp, heavy and modern sound, which fully highlighted the phenomenal drum work of Martin Lopez and the complex guitar playing of Åkerfeldt and Lindgren.
The album opens without any softening introduction with "Wreath," a brutal eleven-minute hammer blow in which the band charges forward with heavy, intricate riffs, thunderous double-bass rhythms, and Åkerfeldt's abysmal growls. The song immediately sets the somber tone of the entire album, with even Lindgren and Åkerfeldt's melodic moments and brilliant solos shrouded in a sense of constant danger and thick gloom.
Immediately following it comes the album's highlight and one of the most monumental works in the history of progressive metal, the title track "Deliverance". Over the course of thirteen and a half minutes, the band leads the listener on a dramatic and breathtaking journey of sharp turns, starting with heavy, groovy riffs, through fragile acoustic passages where Åkerfeldt's clean vocals float above Wilson's mellotron keys, and up to the song's legendary final four minutes. That mesmerizing instrumental ending, based on complex polyrhythms and a repetitive syncopated rhythm in which Lopez, Mendez, and the two guitarists sound like a well-oiled war machine, has become a traditional concert closer for the band, and was even ranked by Rolling Stone magazine on its list of the 100 greatest heavy metal songs of all time.
The band's extreme dynamics reach their thrilling climax on the third track, "A Fair Judgement." It's a dark, majestic ten-minute prog-doom ballad that opens with mournful piano playing and Åkerfeldt's clean, bare vocals, and slowly builds through one of the most melodic and moving guitar solos of the band's career, before collapsing into a slow, heavy, crushing doom-metal riff that locks the song in a somber silence.
As a brief interlude between the mammoth works, the acoustic instrumental piece "For Absent Friends" appears, two minutes of melancholic and pure beauty dedicated to the memory of those who are no longer there, and constitutes a direct and suggestive bridge to the acoustic sound of the twin album "Damnation". The apparent silence is shattered with the entry of "Master's Apprentices", named in homage to the veteran Australian rock band from the sixties. The song opens with one of the heaviest, slowest and most predatory riffs that Åkerfeldt has ever written, reminiscent in its intensity of the band "Morbid Angel", before it unexpectedly breaks into a mesmerizing acoustic middle section where the music leads back to the electric storm. Wilson contributes lead guitar on this track.
The album is capped by the long and experimental piece "By the Pain I See in Others", which spans nearly fourteen minutes of progressive madness, distorted sound effects, Lopez's jazzy rhythms, and sawtooth riffs, ending with long minutes of silence and a hidden, disturbing section of reversed vocals and ghostly piano. The chilling cover art created by the band's in-house artist Travis Smith, depicting a dark Victorian room with a broken doll and a ghostly figure through a mirror, also complements the piece's sense of psychological horror, and directly corresponds with the cover of "Damnation," which was taken from the exact same set.
Upon its release in November 2002, "Deliverance" received rave reviews from music critics, was named one of the albums of the year by Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and Terrorizer magazines, and earned the band the prestigious Swedish Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock (2003). In 2015, the two twin albums were reunited in the joint box set "Deliverance" & Damnation" with a new remix of Deliverance by Bruce Soord and a 5.1 mix of Damnation by Steven Wilson, which finally fulfilled the band's original vision. In the test of time, "Deliverance" stands as conclusive proof that from deep personal pain, impossible pressure and utter chaos, "Opeth" managed to carve, with blood and sweat, one of the greatest and most uncompromising progressive death metal peaks of the 21st century.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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