Blackwater Park

With their fifth album, Sweden’s Opeth redefined what death metal can be. Marrying technical metal with shimmering acoustic passages and vocals both harsh and clean, *Blackwater Park* is a boldly crafted epic. “Harvest” and “Patterns in the Ivy” confirm songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt a master of subtlety, with sweet harmonies over gentle guitar. The dense metal dynamics of “The Drapery Falls” and soaring 12-minute title track, which jumps from brutal riffage to atmospheric fingerpicking, prove Opeth’s prog metal power is all in the journey.

The Swedish band, which mixes psychedelia, prog, and extreme metal, reissues three ambitious studio albums and a live DVD from the early years of the millennium, records that found it transitioning from death growls to cleanly sung acoustic compositions.

Not since the release of Tiamat's groundbreaking masterpiece Wildhoney in 1994 had the extreme metal scene witnessed such an overwhelming show of fan enthusiasm and uniform critical praise as that bestowed upon Blackwater Park, the astounding fifth effort from Swedish metal titans Opeth.