Watershed (CD)

Opeth's career has been one of continuous musical revolution, expanding the boundaries of genre in musical statements that, by this point, pretty much blow the roof off of any sort of classification: they're black metal, but only in a way that's only a part of the larger whole, like the individual lion robots that join together to make up Voltron. In addition, each album -- or observation, as Opeth refers to them in their deliciously pretentious way -- keeps expanding the barriers of expectation, so that from Blackwater Park, when they really started to hit their stride, to Watershed, a mere seven years may have passed in real time, but the musical growth between already excellent albums might be measured in light years.

Watershed's unique flavor lies in its distinctly '70s rock flavor, which infuses every track, supplementing the black metal base with a style that is as unique as it is authentic: though the influences are clearly there, these songs do not pay mere homages to greats like Heart, Black Sabbath, or Led Zeppelin, but develop the band's own aesthetic into a unique cross between progressive sounds of the ancient style and thoroughly modern ideas of metal.

The applications of this mix of then and now are as varied as they are numerous: "Coil," the acoustic duet between frontman Mikael Akerfeldt and guest vocalist Nathalie Lorichs that opens the album, distilling the ethereal quality of all of the Damnation tracks down into one of the most beautiful songs Opeth has ever written; "Burden," a study in the kind of musical enormity favored by the likes of Pink Floyd that ends with a mind-twisting detuning acoustic riff; "The Lotus Eater," which combines traditional Opeth black metal magic with some turbulent keyboard lines and -- in one of the album's most daring successes -- a pure funk bridge; and "Hessian Peel," which, in a "Strawberry Fields"-like maneuver, conjoins a track like something out of Ghost Reveries and a piece of pure Mellotron and acoustic guitar gold right across the middle. With its endlessly enjoyable differentiation wrapped into a cohesive whole, it'll be a huge surprise if Watershed does not end up on top lists of metal albums for the year.