OPETH veröffentlichen heute ihr neues Studioalbum “The Last Will And Testament“. Darauf hat die schwedische Prog-Death Unit ihre Tracks schlicht als Paragraphen bezeichnet. Den sperrigen Song `§4`, hat die Band heute als Hörprobe online gestellt.
Sänger und Gitarrist Mikael Åkerfeldt erklärt zu dem sieben-minütigen Wechselbad der Sounds:
„§4 is a bit of an oddball song – again, just written by instinct. I’m not a clever guy when it comes to writing music. People call us ‚thinking man’s metal‘, I think that’s laughable. I’m just very interested in music, and I listen to music from so many different genres, it’s impossible to me to stick to one genre. I find the idea boring to try and belong somewhere, we’re a bit all over the place, and I think this song shows our diversity. It starts almost traditional… Actually, for the start of the song I was inspired by something called ‚twelve note music‘, which I think is a classical term, where you’re supposed to play twelve notes und you cannot repeat a note twice, you have to do a separate note. It’s also very artistic and a pretentious way of thinking. I heard some of that music by classical pianists playing, and it sounds wicked, it sounds evil, it sounds really strange – so that inspired the initial guitar theme. There’s a Mellotron thing in the beginning, it just sounds odd, like it doesn’t fit in, almost like a free-form jazz solo or something like that. But it quickly kind of lands in an almost traditional metal thing with a common response type death metal vocal that has a stereo double-tracked normal vocal response. Quite effective I think! I can’t remember what happened during the writing process, but I reached a point where I just stopped and felt, ‚ok, time for something strange!‘. We ended up with a flute solo by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, which was kind of an accident in a way, because I asked him to do a narration, not flute. As he was doing the spoken word bits, he asked me ‚do you need a flute solo?‘ I was like, ‚yes, please!‘, while I didn’t really have a part for a flute solo! I had to shuffle through the songs quickly in my head before he would change his mind. I had him on the hook, of course I was gonna find a piece! So, he played almost like a common response type flute solo in §4. This is a great song with the ending piece being one of the more evil pieces of music I’ve written in a long time: it sounds really menacing, sick almost!“
Videostream:
Lyrics:
And now in tranquil fortitude
The shifting sands of time
(You see)
I was sick with fever
”He was sick with fever”
Hand on the hymns
”Collapsing, expiring”
”Ashen eyes in delirium”
No!
”Soliloquy in suspirium”
No! No! No!
A lock on the sanctum
And the cursed, forever in debt
”My” daughter, ”my” unfortunate son…
I bequeath you verity
Twins, usurping strands of flesh
You are not mine
(The) Poison loins of (your) mother
Cursed my vigorous seed
(Yet) Our longing for a child
And my love for her
Birthed a controversial plan
Her eye on him
One so ordinary, soon in nameless grave
The bane of my existence
Sordid flesh communion
Gold in mouth, he impregnates
I swallowed my shame
Like a man of affairs
With lineage and name
Still fast in my prayers