#FavoriteAlbumFriday Still Life by Opeth is, on the surface, a tale of forbidden love, religious persecution, exile, vengeance, and the sort of body count one generally associates with exceptionally poorly moderated town meetings. Beneath that, however, it functions as a gothic meditation on the inevitable collision between private conviction and public dogma, rendered through a succession of riffs so melancholic and labyrinthine that they seem less composed than excavated from some forgotten crypt beneath the collective unconscious. It is the account of a man exiled from his homeland for the grievous offense of possessing beliefs insufficiently endorsed by the local theocracy. Years later, having apparently learned nothing about the dangers of revisiting emotionally catastrophic situations, he returns in secret to reunite with the woman he loves. Unfortunately, she remains trapped within the same suffocating religious order that cast him out, and the ensuing chain of events unfolds with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy and roughly the same regard for the wellbeing of its participants. What follows is a steadily escalating procession of clandestine meetings, suspicion, violence, murder, and increasingly desperate attempts to preserve a love that was doomed long before the first guitar was tuned. Every fleeting moment of tenderness is shadowed by the certainty that neither society nor fate intends to permit it to survive. By the album's conclusion, devotion has become indistinguishable from destruction, and the protagonist finds himself surrounded by the ruins of everything he sought to reclaim. In short, it is an ornate Victorian tragedy disguised as a progressive death metal album, or perhaps the reverse, depending on which aspect you find more terrifying. https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/d11279afabb7.png
Absolutely fantastic. Opeth is truly a joy to listen to.
I love my sad Swedish boys.