The Mellotron occupies a phantasmal space in our pop culture consciousness. One of the earliest examples of sampling technology, its peculiar tone was initially conceived so that anybody could play, say, a flute, by using a tape recording of that flute remapped onto the notes of a keyboard. Only it wouldn’t come out sounding quite like a flute. The distortion of the tape produced a timbre drenched in a kind of eerie nostalgia; its choir bank was described as the sound of “dead men singing.” The keyboard became so popular on the back of songs like “Space Oddity” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” that by the ’70s, it was rare to attend a progressive rock show without seeing one. Its warble seemed the embodiment of dreams, that melted meeting point between memories and fantasy. The tape’s decayed form of analog recall is part and parcel with the instrument. Deploying this iconic sound for their prog-haunted album Damnation, Opeth made one small change: They used MIDIs.
A Departure from the Vanguard
Where exactly does Opeth stand these days, anyway? Once at the vanguard of prog’s evolution into the 21st century, lately the Swedish metal godfathers feel about as antiquated as the ’70s records they bowed down to throughout their golden run. Though they earned international acclaim for their predilection for 10-plus minute songs, fingerpicked acoustic interludes, and frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt’s tendency to swap freely between throaty growls and his melodic, fragile singing voice, you don’t really hear too much about them beyond their dedicated fanbase.
The Emotional Resonance of Damnation
Based on their titles—Deliverance and Damnation—you’d probably guess Damnation was the heavy one. While Deliverance follows more or less in the footsteps of Blackwater Park, Damnation digs into a strange new realm for the band, uncovering something even darker. Gone are the extended multi-part suites and intricate guitar workouts, replaced by slight, tender melodies engulfed in a striking emptiness. Steven Wilson’s keyboards lurk around every corner, summoning vistas that are more claustrophobic than sprawling. Åkerfeldt sings as if he’s trapped in a never-ending goodbye, sighing about moonlit skies, faces glanced through windows, old photographs, “skin covering secret scars.”
At the time, Åkerfeldt claimed that Damnation’s deviation from metal would be a one-off for the band, but it only took a couple albums for him to drop his harsh vocals entirely and steer Opeth into the full-on prog worship they had always threatened. While those later albums included the kind of knotty, complex arrangements expected of the genre, none of them would come close to the emotional resonance they achieved on Damnation. For a band known for fitting as many ideas into their songs as physically possible, it’s striking to hear them write with such directness, to focus on feeling above all else.