Rave Reviews For Opeth's Watershed

A recent post on Opeth's new album, Watershed has proved very popular with readers of Rock Revival (here). Here are some out-takes from selected reviews. Check out the entire review on links provided.

Opeth has developed a distinctive style over the years, and Watershed continues the development and refinement of that style. Beautiful acoustic passages lead into intense death metal, with all kinds of lengthy progressive and experimental sections. There are more of those progressive and experimental parts that ever before. Put everything together and you have another outstanding Opeth album. About.com Heavy metal

In short, Watershed is an album that really breathes new life into a band that was thought to have been on a slow but steady decline. It's the freshest Opeth has sounded since Still Life and a major overhaul of the formula they've been following since that album. Blistering.com

Unlike Ghost Reveries, which comfortably, and impeccably, amalgamated the various sounds and textures Opeth had been toying with for a decade into a spellbinding realization of the band’s signature sound, Watershed is a major turning point for the band, as they’ve now made a significant shift towards the progressive rock sounds of 35 years ago, their extreme metal, which they used to be so firmly rooted in, now cleverly used more as a starting-off point than merely the groundwork of the music. It’s their most crucial album since 1999’s stunning Still Life, and its title could not be more appropriate. popmatters

The Swedish metal band Opeth widened its sound in the mid-’90s, letting in acoustic guitars and clean vocals, and its albums since then have been careful refinements, with long, admirably coherent songs. “Watershed” (Roadrunner), the new Opeth album, broad enough to encompass death-metal pummeling as well as cello and English horn, is typically engrossing — symphonic, and in a way organic. The New York Times

Opeth's U.S. profile is at a tipping point, as the Swedish progressive band is ready to break into the metal mainstream if it keeps playing its cards right. "Watershed" reaffirms the quintet's style of transposing driving black metal with interludes tender enough for children's ears. Billboard