Based on their titles—Deliverance and Damnation—you’d probably guess Damnation was the heavy one. While Deliverance follows more or less in the footsteps of Blackwater Park, Damnation digs into a strange new realm for the band, uncovering something even darker. Gone are the extended multi-part suites and intricate guitar workouts, replaced by slight, tender melodies engulfed in a striking emptiness. Wilson’s keyboards lurk around every corner, summoning vistas that are more claustrophobic than sprawling. Åkerfeldt sings as if he’s trapped in a never-ending goodbye, sighing about moonlit skies, faces glanced through windows, old photographs, “skin covering secret scars.” In “To Rid the Disease”’s morbid opening moments, he murmurs, “There’s nobody here/There’s nobody near/I try not to care/Dead eyes always stare.” It’s a lonely, lonely record, sweeping Opeth’s theatrics away to reveal the spectres underneath.
Shrouded in Wilson’s bank of MIDI Mellotrons, the band aimed to get as close as they could to recreating the world of their ’70s idols. But something is off. Besides the aforementioned keys, Damnation doesn’t actually sound much like prog. The mix is too crisp and modern, the songs too short, Åkerfeldt’s delivery methods too to-the-point. Perhaps it could pass as an album-length exploration of the opening two minutes of “Moonchild,” or, if you squint, the chilliest bits of Camel’s The Snow Goose. Truthfully, the band lands a lot closer to the wilted slowcore of groups like Red House Painters, miserable and intimate and distinctly informed by the ’90s.
In Opeth’s case, this manifests as a smoldering grunginess. Metal creeps around the margins, as on opener “Windowpane,” where the band turns over a tumbling 6/4 riff, holding a smoky extra 9th on the chord that gives everything an added layer of tension. Though the song is heavily acoustic, its distorted guitar solos hail squarely from the realm of harder rock, and the artificial choirs that seep in toward the end seem to call out to the symphonic citadels of the Norwegian black metallers.
Even compared to the quieter moments on their previous albums, the songwriting on Damnation is uniquely hollowed. On the central riff of “In My Time of Need,” Åkerfeldt holds only two frets down, plucking the rest of the chord on open strings and letting their smoggy notes reverberate hazily off one another. “Ending Credits” grows from a straightforward instrumental into a weeping dual guitar harmony by song’s end, and “Hope Leaves,” one of the album’s peaks, unfurls from hushed fingerpicking into a luminescent bath of bell-toned keys, picking up a surprisingly understated groove. Drummer Martin Lopez and bassist Martín Méndez (both of Uruguayan heritage) expand the band’s rhythm section beyond aggro blastbeats into subtler directions, guiding “Windowpane” through a tightly controlled, fluttering midsection jam, and gradually building “Closure” into a dissonant outro layered with Uruguayan tamboril.
At the time, Åkerfeldt claimed that Damnation’s deviation from metal would be a one-off for the band, but it only took a couple albums for him to drop his harsh vocals entirely and steer Opeth into the full-on prog worship they had always threatened. While those later albums included the kind of knotty, complex arrangements expected of the genre, none of them would come close to the emotional resonance they achieved on Damnation. The climaxes on this record never come in the form of a rapturous church organ bridge or an extended jazz freakout, but instead materialize in more nuanced tones, like the low acoustic strums that imbue the chorus of “In My Time of Need” with an epic dread, or Wilson’s pianos on “To Rid the Disease,” which float through the end of the song like dying leaves. For a band known for fitting as many ideas into their songs as physically possible, it’s striking to hear them write with such directness, to focus on feeling above all else.
