The times they are a-changin' (a little, anyway)

The band that divides metalheads like no other -- there, that ought to scare everyone off even more than a sports post ever could -- which is coming tomorrow, muahahahaha, etc. -- are they the White Castle of headbanging, love 'em or hate 'em? -- has returned with their ninth full-length, Watershed. An audacious title, no? Or an entirely accurate one unrealized upon first glance? Neither their most brutal album, nor their most mellow, it's unquestionably their furthest exploration into the depths of 70s progressive rock, one of their creative foundations, nearly as equal in importance as thunderously sick metallic riffs. And it's unmistakably their most layered, their moodiest.

Coil rises up, a jarring shock to the system used to the rolling, viciously sprawling ten-minute power chord-saturated openers of the past such as The Moor, Advent and The Leper Affinity, to instead strike with three minutes of dark neo-folk guitar and narcotic voices, those of mainman Mikael Åkerfeldt and guest Natalie Lorichs, surreptitiously dragging us ever so delicately down into the bleak.

And what is bleaker than the sludgy darkness announcing the doom awaiting the Heir Apparent? A crushing riff, the eerie tinkling of piano keys, the triumphant return of said riff layered with corrosive death metal vocals. All these trappings of the genre are expertly woven within each measure. Oh, when you reach the bridge, toss in a few jazzy snare hits underneath a smattering of ambient guitar and don't forget the machine-gun percussion and snarled lyrics leading to the hypnotic denouement where, wrapping up the proceedings, guitar lines are stretched to the limits as to let the emotion pour forth as blood from a fatal wound. Thanks.

Yeah, the song is pretty fucking good.

Amidst the plethora of seemingly ephemeral, if not outright jury-rigged and glued-on wanderings -- the constant fluctuation between light and shade, heavy and soft -- an Opeth song is nothing but a teleological argument; there is a purpose, despite the inane ramblings of troo kvlt partisans: human feeling, and all its hues -- and the world contained therein -- is examined. The gentle hum of a troubadour before the off-kilter juxtaposition of clean vocals over blastbeats followed by deathly ones over more standard, yet still galloping, fare, trading jabs over a bedrock of propulsive riffing, meandering off course, shipwrecked on shores lapped by waves of barely audible, resonating keys and green, verdant guitar, the land of The Lotus Eater, a drama spiraling out of control, captured in an awkward, descending chord progression that mutates into a neo-funk riff before pushing back into the uncertain future, the possible end of one's world.

The hours of that world contain our Burden, and the notes growing within display the full flower of the band's longtime progressive leanings. Shadowy, emotional lines create an ethereal panorama inhabited by a searing Fredrik Åkesson guitar solo, the presence of a rippling organ line; this is saddened Deep Purple and melancholy Yes filtered through one of the foremost purveyors of Scandinavian death metal at their most despondent. The guitars fade until only one remains, fluttering into discordance and accompanied by an understated laugh, a lost character from the mass of lunacy at the beginning of Black Sabbath's The Writ, chuckling at our pain.

That pain is released with the inevitable shattering of those with a Porcelain Heart. Pregnant with a forlorn temperament, the murky, gothic sentiment of black walls closing in around us, faint whispers of deeds we've done, the ghosts of our past, those memories of loss, calling to us in soft, single notes between torrents of undulating, disjointed chords and wordless harmonies before the opening motif's reprise, a declaration that such despair cannot be vanquished.

A monochrome underpinning gently giving way to the veils of a dreamy Technicolor kitchen-sink prog workout, Hessian Peel wonderfully displays the largest improvement over the last album, the far better utilization of the keyboards. They never dominate proceedings but provide atmosphere, context and when necessary, epic sweep along the gently ascending guitar riff, climbing the beautiful, sloping, yet neverending meadow before settling at last on the rock of abrasive death metal on which the song pivots. And which should have been a bigger piece, you goddamn bastards.

Reading the song titles, I expected this to be an excursion into violence. Though the subject matter -- as is the case with every Opeth song -- isn't full of fuzzy little bunnies, the dynamic of Hex Omega never fully opens up, merely teases, threatening to burst. Executing such a construction often fails with spectacular results, but here it works and the song is growing on me with each listen. Quiet into loud with classic, vaguely eastern-sounding metal riffs arriving before a shift into a sweep of keys that guide us to the end of the piece with it's fuzzed-out guitar and marching, insistent drumwork.

Ask Norway's monumental Enslaved about purists, those of the black metal variety in their case, laying childish complaints -- based in ever-weakening attachment to some long-dead school of the old descending further into the recesses of history -- at their feet and how that impacted their natural musical progression not one iota. I'm sure the death metal weenies out there will find plenty to bitch and moan about here, but Opeth are not Suffocation, nor Deicide, and they never were. It's quite convenient to leave Silhouette or To Bid You Farewell or Credence out of the equation, isn't it. I myself would be remiss in not admitting that I wouldn't have minded another steroid injection or three of Blackwater Park or Demon of the Fall-style brutality, and after the addition of a full-time keyboardist -- and with three years of retrospection, the partial (for them, from their lofty creative perch, anyway) misstep of Ghost Reveries -- one could be justified in clinging to a wary nature. Yet to look back once more upon that musical landscape, the previous album was still among, if not the, best releases of 2005; that's simply how high Opeth have set the bar. Their 'fuckups' would proudly be the masterworks of others. Lessons learned, gentlemen. Watershed does its moniker proud.