Discovering Opeth

[opeth_353]

Discovered them on Powertab. Mate d/l'd BWP when it came out.. i loved it.. bought Morningrise.. went from there.

 

[<wAr_neRVe>]

I saw the review of Blackwaterpark in Kerrang and Metal Hammer and i decided to take a risk and buy the album. I simply couldn't believe what i was listening to, it was so good.

 

[Korlich]

I borrowed BWP from a public libary and listened to it a couple of times and I was hooked. I bought the rest of their catalouge fairly soon after that. My fav. album is Still Life. It&#180;s just the most complete Opeth album. Anyway GR is getting really close to Still Life.

 

[Ecto]

I don't remeber. But I know that they were with Morningrise only. I went to a cd store with nothing in mind to buy. Then a asked the guy there to show me something weird and he gave me a couple of cds. One of them was Morningrise. I could not listen to it because it was sealed but I got completely hooked by the cd cover and by the fact that it was only 5 songs and one of them with 20 minutes long.

When at home I went to my stereo and...I didn't like the album. I found it boring. After some weeks he kept on growing in me and that is it!

 

[back_space]

Read a review of Blackwater Park in "CMJ". On the monthly sampler CD was the song "Harvest". Intrigued, and having been very into metal in my teens and early 20's I picked up BWP. At first I was stunned by the death vox, but then grew to love it over the course of the following weeks. Soon afterward, i picked up, MAYH, and Morningrise. Loved both of them, with MAYH still being my favorite.

Finally saw them on their winter tour in 2003. It was incredible. I am patiently waiting, and hoping, that they make it north of Chicago on another leg of touring soon.

 

[Guthrucci]

Hey i just registered here on the opeth forum. I discovered Opeth probably about a year ago, from being flooded with people raving about them on the Petrucci forum. And well i got hooked and i absolutely love them, they are easily my favorite band. The first album i got was Blackwater Park and i loved it, then i got Deliverence and Damnation and absolutely loved Damnation, one of the best albums ever made in my opinion. Then i got Morningrise and discovered the really great old school Opeth, but it is all good stuff. I love them

 

[Darkhammer]

eh, most of you where "instantly hooked" or immediately, most Opeth takes awhile and a few listens to settle in, i refuse to believe you heard them and where like "oh wow, thats great music" because at first, its not.

 

[Guthrucci]

oh i definitly wasn't instantly hooked, it took a while for me to get used to/like the growls, but not that long. I think it was harder to see myself as a Death Metal fan, but now i just dont give a shit, Opeth is too good to ignore

 

[Dreadful]

I believe these people...the first bars of The Leper affinity instantly made me a fan. I remember I was like 16 or something, it was late 2001, I think around christmas....I was walking around target with a couple of my cousins with a cd player putting it on for the first time. I listened to that cd for the rest of the day sitting in their living room.
How I got around to buying blackwater park was just seeing it at circuit city and every other cd store. I saw an article in revolver about them and it just seemed like they would be a real interesting, open minded, innovative, inspirational band to listen to. and they have been....none of their other cds were available in stores (at that time anyway) so I just ordered the rest online.

 

[Heckelgruber]

eh, most of you where "instantly hooked" or immediately, most Opeth takes awhile and a few listens to settle in, i refuse to believe you heard them and where like "oh wow, thats great music" because at first, its not.

I agree, the first time a friend of mine played me some Opeth I couldn't really understand what he was raving on about. I find Opeth albums need a few listens before they're really appreciated, and the more times you go back to them the more you discover. I'm quite new to Opeth and I'm trying not to get all the CDs at the same time My first album was Ghost Reveries, which Mrs. Heckelgruber bought for my birthday...

 

[Loeben]

I'm a newbie to Opeth. A good friend of mine recommended I check them out promising me some great layered prog music (he did not mention growling lol). I'm in to all sorts of different types of shit so I said what the hell. I bought GR and fired up Ghost of Perdition and was immediately turned off by it. I didn't even finish the song. Skipped to Baying. Skipped to Mire. I was doing some growling of my own at this point... Skipped to Attonement. Attonement threw me for a loop. I was like WTF are these guys about? I listened to it all the way through and then moved to Reveries.

HOOKED

I have since got their entire collection. It's been awesome discovering this band for the first time - instead of how most people here listened to Opeth, I started with GR and walked back through their albums. I have to say that BWP is my favorite followed closely by MAYH. After I got a taste for their growls dude, I wanted more and more. And here I am posting on their forum... lol

 

[Heckelgruber]

I have since got their entire collection. It's been awesome discovering this band for the first time - instead of how most people here listened to Opeth, I started with GR and walked back through their albums. I have to say that BWP is my favorite followed closely by MAYH. After I got a taste for their growls dude, I wanted more and more. And here I am posting on their forum... lol

I'm just the same. I recently got back into metal and just discovered Opeth through Ghost Reveries after a bit of a Slayer phase...

 

[the opeth affinity]

my girlfriend downloaded me some songs from BWP and i was hooked
she probably regrets it know cause their entire catalouge is the only music ive been playing now for 2 years

 

[RiffBoy]

My son always plays me lots of great music. Or just music he likes. I don't always like what he shows me, but I always gives it a try... I'm 49 (yes, that is right!) and I still like rock and metal just as I've done for 35 years!

Now let me tell you the reason I found and started to LOVE this very special band Opeth!

Last spring (2005) I had just complained to him that no great music comes around these days...! Only my old favourite bands from the seventies (Jethro Tull, Yes, Greenslade, etc) which are still going (strong) and issues new albums are the only thing to listen to... or the great solo artists (Joni Michell, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel etc) that are still around...

But even Black Sabbath and Deep Purple were better in the seventies (than they are now). Thats what I think anyway...

One of my first four LP's (bought in 1971!) was Deep Purple in rock. Oh, I wanted to be a guitarist like Blackmore... I even grew my hair to shoulder length! (But the truth is that I bought my Fender Stratocaster... only six months ago!! Sometimes things just don't go as fast as you want...)

Oh, yes I saw lots of great concerts in Stockholm in the seventies - Little Feat, Santana, Frank Zappa, Genesis, Bruce Springsteen, JJ Cale, Supertramp, Weather Report, Greenslade, Jackson Browne, Focus, Keith Jarrett, etc (And abroad - Thin Lizzy, Trapeze, Humble Pie, Mott the Hoople, etc...)

So, this last spring my son sat me down to watch something special. First he had tried to play me some Opeth tracks, but I got uneasy by the growling. Then after a few tries I got at least interested by the music surrounding the growling (which I found wasn't THAT bad compared to the average death vocals I had heard earlier).

So he sat me down to watch something. He said I must! Ok. I sat down. It was the documetary of "Lamentations". (Really a great introduction to the band and their music!)

It was like turning a key! I even gradually got accustomed to the growling. (Now I like it!) And the music... was AWSOME!

First Blackwater Park. Then Deliverance. Then Damnation. Who are these guys?!!! Then the new album came this fall - we sat down in my sofa and I turned my HiFi up really much. First track of GR blasted out of my speakers and we looked at each other and went almost like "high five".

Then... Baying of the hounds! I just started laughing of joy!! This was just fantastic... (I get tears in my eyes now... I really love Opeth!!)

At LAST a new band (well, new to me) that makes music that is not just great, but perhaps better than anything I ever heard ...since i listened to Beatles and The Rolling Stones from my brothers stereos when I was a kid in the late sixties!

Thank you, my dear son, for introducing Opeth to me. I am REALLY greatful!

And, thank you Opeth for your musical vision! You rule!!

Cheers!

 

[metalisticpain]

A friend told me about it. I remember the conversation perfectly. it went...

blah blah blah deliverance blah blah blah..

So i grabbed the cd and listened to it.. and 1st impressions were...
Wreath - wtf is this crap, this is shit
Deliverance - hmm mabye its alright
A Fair Judgement - its ok
for absent friends - (i didnt have an opinion)
Master's Apprentices - omg this song f*cking rocks, sic riff

And thats the song that did it for me... i like wreath now by the way lol.

 

[Deadlift]

When i started lifting some weights 10 years ago (or something like that) we often listened to new swedish metal bands that my friend had gotten from tapetrading (or whatever you call it). Well..between the sweat and pain we commented bands and theirs music. Necrophobic, Dawn, Naglfar, Dissection, Katatonia were some of them...at that time they were not that well known.

One day he told me "This is Mikes band Opeth, he`s a friend to Jonas from Katatonia" or something like that. "In the mist she was standing" was the first songt i heard and i can honestly say that it was really weird music to hear -95. But it grew on me fast and i probably bought one of the first sold albums here, haha ! Since thoose days i`m hooked and i have followed them since that day but i never thought at that time that they would be as big as they are today.

\m/

 

[Deadlift]

On the AOL heavy metal message boards lots of people mentioned Opeth as an awesome metal band, so i got the songs "Hope Leaves" and "Credence" and was like metal?????

Then I got Bleak and then the rest of BWP and was like "oooohhh ok, so they are metal." However, BWP is not my favorite album now.

Haha, good start....

 

[biggsy]

my dads best mates son showed me opeth... first time i heard it i was in grade 6 (which means i was 12) and i laughed because of the death vox. but a couple of years ago my cousin visited with a cd and played it to me and i was hooked straight away... the song was harvest so it just hung the bait over my head and i went all out, got all the cds and rarely listen to otger stuff.

 

[Stilgar]

eh, most of you where "instantly hooked" or immediately, most Opeth takes awhile and a few listens to settle in, i refuse to believe you heard them and where like "oh wow, thats great music" because at first, its not.

I must say that I was instantly hooked. But then again, I was very much into the swedish death metal scene at the time. It was in 1995 when Opeth had just released Orchid that a friend of mine visited me and had brought his latest find. He put it in my cd player and started playing "The Twilight Is My Robe". And as I said, I instantly fell in love with it and bought CD the first chance I had. "Morningrise" I also didn't have any problems getting into, but "My Arms Your Hearse" did take a while for me to really like.

 

[oddentity]

I initially came from a prog rock perspective. Four years ago, I saw this review for Still Life in the Gibraltar Encyclopedia for Progressive Rock:

Still Life: An even more dramatic improvement and probably the band's highest achievement so far, this album is their most complex and intricate work. The compositional technique has developed far beyond the linear riff-sequencing of the two previous records; the songs have a clear, cohesive identity and are tied together by motifs and themes whose echoes reappear as variations in different parts of the song, thus enhancing the "storytelling" aspect of the music. Music-wise, here you can find jazzy chord-progressions and leads, atonal chaotic death-metal, classical guitar detours, lush polyphonic layering of acoustic and distorted guitars, and a whole variety of vocal styles. Again, this is a concept album. Every song is brilliant here. "The Moor" begins with a surreal, uneasy acoustic-plus-lead mantra which leads into a journey through open spaces of fast riffing; later all guitar-layers dissolve one by one for a quiet, introspective detour and then back into intense movement; a very picturesque song. "Godhead's Lament" starts with an intense burst reminiscent of the darkest and most ironic symphonies of Shostakovich; the theme slowly hides behind new images, only to return after a folkish song-within-a-song, as a mocking variation. "Benighted" offers a meditative respite : a classical acoustic guitar theme develops beautifully and contains a bluesy guitar solo. "Moonlapse Vertigo" is another well-crafted composition, held together by a shifting rhythmic pattern; a relaxed song, even in the distorted parts, with a very prominent Camel influence. "The Face of Melinda" is the emotional core of the album - a moody jazz-rock song with rhyming verses transforms into a moving, powerful hymn. "Serenity Painted Death", after a neutral introduction, erupts into chaos and despair; themes with seemingly incompatible moods frantically escape from each other - vision of death, anguish, desolation, indifference, rage, pain, oblivion, awakening and again the vision of death. In this song the "inconsistency" returns with a soul-shattering result. The closing track, "White Cluster" continues the chaos, the peak comes with an ascending scale-recitation, repeated on and on with growing intensity, conjuring a feeling of inevitability. Close to genius and absolutely recommended.

I was very excited by this review and bought Still Life straight away. Naturally, I was blown away .....