Retro Recommendation: Opeth - Morningrise

Once a week I'll turn the blog over to Dan Marsicano for his Retro Recommendation, giving you a chance to learn about underrated and overlooked gems from metal's past. This week, Opeth is in the spotlight.

Opeth is one of those bands that always gets a reaction out of people. Cries of "brilliant" and "masterful" are interspersed with sneers and eye-rolling, as the band leaves some metal heads swooning and others scratching their head in confusion. No album better represents this than 1996's Morningrise. An exercise in patience, the five songs have an average running length of ten-plus minutes. An ambitious direction for sure, this was the first Opeth album that defined the sound they would use for the rest of their career.

On their debut album Orchid, Opeth introduced their patent soft acoustic/blistering death metal dynamic. Morningrise tinkered with this dynamic, making the transition between the two more fluid and less contrived. For its time, a Swedish death metal band doing what Opeth did was almost unheard of. Yet the band makes it work, using their excellent musicianship and progressive songwriting traits to create five separate epics that feel like pieces of one complete package.

Picking out highlights among the hour-plus of music on Morningrise is tough, but a few notable moments stand out. This is the first Opeth album to feature clean vocals in a great capacity, especially in the band's first-ever acoustic ballad "To Bid You Farewell." Mikael Åkerfeldt still has the raspy, black metal-ish growls that were present on Orchid, though he would later change them to a more coherent, deeper tone on future albums.

"Black Rose Immortal" is the band's first real opus, taking 20 minutes to weave a harrowing tale with distinct movements and passages. The acoustic work on the track has a 70's prog/folk vibe, and the differences between tranquility and brutality resonate sharply throughout. While the acoustic guitar is never far away, tracks like "Nectar" and "Advent" lean towards the traditional progressive death metal sound that the band would lean towards on their next album My Arms, Your Hearse.

A lot of newer Opeth fans seem to hardly bat a glance towards Morningrise. While the production isn't strong and the lyrics were emotionally over-the-top, this album showcased a young band making their own rules and not adhering to the death metal guidelines set up by their predecessors. For taking chances with their sound, incorporating the audible bass guitar work to maximum effect and having the balls to make every song over ten minutes long, Morningrise gets the nod for this week's Retro Recommendation.