Misseriah said:
Black Metal? Opeth has no evidence of any black metal in their music, other than it is heavy. There's no blastbeats, hardly, if any, tremolo, no high pitched screams, and most of all, no corpse paint. If it wasn't for the progressive sections in their music, Opeth would be a melodic death metal band. Period.
Actually as I always end up saying there is far more BM in their early works vocally and atmosphere wise. And guitarwise it doesn't ever sound particularly DM or BM, but whatever. The vocals are more DM since Still Life.
They were influenced by DM (see Morbid Angel) and toured with a bunch of BM bands who were around at the same time in the early days, so obviously it had some influence on them.
But its commonly agreed that Opeth are a Prog Death Metal band, whether that is accurate or not, its what most people know them as, so if we have to give them a genre that is as unaccurate as any other it may as well be that. There isn't really a lot of prog going on either... more ambient on Ghost Reveries, folk on earlier stuff etc... its progressive in its nature of... well, progressing, and obviously the band like prog.
But they are no more prog than they are DM, (see camel rip off and MA rip off...) but the point is, most Opeth fans are either fans of extreme metal (DM,BM,PM, whatever) or Prog(rock, metal, whatever) so they dub the band prog death metal. And as always, its the fans who decide the genre because clearly the band don't care.
Uh... and something about him being funny... or was that another thread?