The Last Will And Testament

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8.0

• Bands:
  OPETH
• Duration: 00:50:52
• Available from: 11/22/2024
• Label:

• Reigning Phoenix Music

Streaming not yet available

When Opeth revealed the first single from “The Last Will And Testament”, considerable interest was immediately generated because, after a long time spent exploring the intricacies of 1970s progressive rock, Mikael Åkerfeldt suddenly rediscovered, even in the studio , the taste of growling.
We asked ourselves if this would be the long-awaited return to their origins album, if Opeth would return to that style that made them unique for so many years and which now seemed to belong to the past: the answer to these questions, as always happens in these cases, it's more nuanced than a simple yes or no.
Listening to “The Last Will And Testament” certainly gave us back a band that has finally made peace with its past, rediscovering an energy and immediacy that seemed to have been lost in their latest album releases. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to expect the same band that composed fundamental records like “Blackwater Park” or “Still Life”. The path that began with “Heritage” has not been interrupted, but continues along a different path: the taste for prog rock has remained unchanged in Mikael and “The Last Will And Testament” represents from this point of view the result of musical research and stylistics of the highest level. The real news, all things considered, is that Opeth finally seem to have found that point of balance between what they were and what they want to be today.
“The Last Will And Testament” is a dark, dark and refined album, which rediscovers the pleasure of telling mysterious stories, through an extremely refined concept album also from a literary point of view.
The story – a sort of gothic family drama that gradually reveals itself following the death of a patriarch with a dark past and the opening of his will – develops through seven tracks, titled simply like the numbers of as many paragraphs.
In these first seven songs, the band puts all its incredible ability as instrumentalists and arrangers into music. The two singles presented, “§1” and “§3”, are already exemplary of what the listener will find on the album, yet once again it becomes an arduous task to be able to describe the atmosphere of these songs, they are so rich in stratifications, details and interpretations.
Thus “§2” finds a new note in the second voice of Joey Tempest of Europe, while “§4” touches one of the peaks of the album in a dialogue between the guitars and Ian Anderson's transverse flute; the leader of Jethro Tull, also present here as narrator, bends in an unexpected way to the needs of the album, replacing his impetuous style with more enveloping and sinister melodies, which fit perfectly with the atmosphere of the song. No less interesting is also “§5”, which recovers Middle Eastern atmospheres, with the strings resting on a rhythmic carpet of percussion, before an explosion of electric fury very close to the Opeth of the past.
Speaking of the strings, it is worth underlining how the album has been punctuated by orchestral interventions, played by a real ensemble, which add a further touch of elegance and which we hope can be exploited again in the future.
We are now well over halfway through the album, and we first come across “§6”, a sparkling example of prog metal the likes of which we haven't heard in Opeth's discography for years, and then “§7”, whose strongly narrative structure it is ideal to close the reading of the will.
However, our journey is not over, because Åkerfeldt and his companions give us one last pearl: “A Story Never Told” is a melancholy and persuasive ballad that takes us directly back to that masterpiece “Damnation”: the excellent use of the piano, as well as the guitar textures, draw a perfect conclusion to the record. A conclusion that deviates from the general sound – starting from the title – becoming a sort of final comment on the entire story.
It is almost useless to dwell on the instrumental quality of the album – simply stellar – but we would like to mention the excellent work done by the drummer Walter Vayrynen, the creator of a capital performance, which undoubtedly contributed to recovering that recently tarnished energy.
“The Last Will And Testament”, therefore, is not exactly the work that takes Opeth back to their origins. In fact, it is a record that can be best appreciated not so much by those who abandoned the band after “Watershed”, but rather by those who, like the writer, have continued to find points of interest in their proposal, while recognizing the superiority of the first phase of their career.
It is a compromise, we are aware of it, and yet after so many years of waiting, it is truly the best we could legitimately expect.