The product of hair-pullingly intense work that saw the partial completion of a second, mellower batch of material (to be released a few months hence, as Damnation), Deliverance delivers the no-nonsense, slashing progressive metal persona of the band to balance the next record’s purposeful commercial side. Comprising five tracks over ten minutes long, standing like great pillars around a barely audible bit of jazzy guitar introspection called For Absent Friends, the album gets right down to business with Wreath, Mikael death-growling immediately over one of the band’s signature, evil, Voivod-angled riffs. The title track pounces quickly as well, more almost Fear Factory-clean double-bass announcing the track, which, near the end of its 13 minutes of funky, double-helix, Aerosmith-meets-Tool, offers the record’s highlight, an instrumental bit of heavy hypnosis that recalls the mathematical formulae of King’s X’s ‘We Were Born To Be Loved’. With no big changes from last album, and production from band, Andy Sneap and Porcupine Tree’s Steve Wilson that is just there, competent, maybe too clinical, the album will please fans and alas, is another canny masterpiece of sinewy pan-world melodies twisted into doom-shrouded metal riffs. I dunno, there’s no doubt that we all hold Opeth to crazy high standards that would incinerate mere humans, but I personally like both Blackwater Park and Still Life better than this one, although it sounds like this is an album that will be a grower, given patience from the listener to find and cultivate the hooks, if indeed there are any. Maybe they’re all on the "rock" album to come. I can tell, come album after Damnation, or two or three out, these guys are going to be talking about how this album was rushed and they weren’t happy with the songs or the sounds blah blah blah… Still, it’s Opeth. There is an admirable singularity of purpose here, Mikael and Peter finding dozens upon dozens of exotic and ornate riffs that pour like sylvan mercury into a single alchemical, emotional brass bowl, all manner of circuitous wiring sounding mournful yet academic, as if too much deep thought on the tiring act of living can only lead to the elevated enlightenment that continuing to breathe in and breathe out is not intellectually sound.