Opeth - new album "Pale Communion"

I got mine from Amazon.fr. With the exchange rate it came out to about $28.00 including shipping and took about 10 days to get to my house, so only a few more dollars than if you were to order the US pressing from Amazon.

 

yeah unfortunately they are OOS

 

Amazon UK or Germany should have the same pressing. It was mastered in France and pressed in Germany.

 

all OOS sadface

 

Discogs?

 

too expensive brother ! i'd drop $30 maybe $35 though these are all like $45 shipped + on discogs

 

I have a US printing.

Sounds very nice. I cleaned the lp before playing but it flat and sounds great.

Maybe I just got lucky?

 

I have a US printing.

Sounds very nice. I cleaned the lp before playing but it flat and sounds great.

Maybe I just got lucky?

 

I got mine off of Discogs. I think I paid a little over $40 for it. In the future, I'm only preordering UK pressings of new Opeth albums. I really should have dropped my US preorder and preordered the clear vinyl they had up. My clear vinyl Heritage sounds spectacular.

Don't buy it from Marvelio UK on Amazon UK. They are a great seller, but they ship the US pressing, as the actual shipper is in Pennsylvania. I made that mistake.

At this point, eBay and Discogs seem to be your only options. Get one while you can. Mine is about as perfect a pressing as you can get. Zero surface noise or odd distortions.

 

We both got lucky, my copy is very clean and sounds phenomenal.

 

Maybe I'll try a again on a US copy. I recently got 2 copies of watershed and ghost reveries and they are all fine and all on road runner. GR especially is great very flat and quiet black vinyl.

 

Or just buy the CD...

 

Except he's clearly looking for the LP.

 

I decided to take a chance on this and really like it a lot.

The only other Opeth album I have is Damnation which is OK but nothing great IMO (I need to listen to it again after seeing how much I dig this new one). I once bought a copy of Blackwater Park but got rid of it because I could not stomach the awful growling vocals. I understand that Heritage also has "real"/singing vocals so I guess I need to pick that one up!

 

"Damnation" is my favorite. Just a great record!

 

They have some of the best "growled" vocals in metal however that's not your thing so…..get Damnation and Heritage next, those are clean singing only.

Windowpane from Damnation

 

Give Damnation a few more spins. It's really a very beautiful album, and it's the album that got me into Opeth---ten years after it was released!
Like you, I have no use for the growling vocals--or for the "death metal" genre in general--but what a great band of musicians. Mikael Akerfeldt is something of a visionary whose taste in music is all over the map.

 

Agreed regarding Damnation and I would add that there are songs off Blackwater Park, Deliverance, etc. that are akin to the songs on Damnation. I made a really nice cdr many years back of just 'clean vocal' songs from their catalog.
Also a good point regarding Ackerfeldt. Probably because they've investigated Opeth through the Wilson connection but I've seen Opeth referred to on this forum as some sort of Wilson project which is not at all accurate.

 

If you're just exploring Opeth I recommend getting the concert DVD Lamentations.

The concert has two sets. The first set is the entire Damnation album plus Harvest from Blackwater Park, all clean vocals and I think the live performances are even better than the studio version in some cases, especially in the song Closure which gets an extended workout here.

The second set is some of the heavier material, but actually seeing the band perform these tricky compositions really helped me acclimate myself to Mikael's harsh vocals. I went from initially tolerating them...to appreciating them...to liking them. The heavy set isn't all harsh vocals either, the song A Fair Judgement features clean vocals as well.

All told, 10 tracks with all clean vocals, a couple tracks with primarily clean vocals the remaining couple tracks are a 50/50 split. I tell you what though, even when I was having a hard time with the vocals at first I was absolutely blown away by the arrangement of the song Deliverance, it's stunning.

 

http://www.moshcam.com/opeth/enmore-theatre-1007.aspx#/1-the-devils-orchard

as a long time fan who thought he preferred the prog DEATH side of opeth more than the heritage era... I have proved myself WRONG. They can do no wrong for me it seems and I would have loved to been at a show like this.

I got another copy of pale communion 2lp on the way lol, maybe 2 out of 4 will be ok if this one is ?

 

I've actually seen Opeth live btw - probably on the Porcupine Tree Deadwing tour (? I forget). They were the opening act. Damnation was probably their album out at the time.

It's been years since I listened to Damnation and the only thing I remember is that it sounded Floydy/spacey, very mellow. Got it in the "to listen to" pile again now though...

 

It's way off base to refer to Opeth as a Steven Wilson "side project." That is just wrong. That said, Steven Wilson has probably had a measure of influence over the way some of Opeth's albums sound--as he's produced and played on a few of them. Wilson and Akerfeldt are kindred souls and they have a common side-project in Storm Corrosion.

 

Akerfeldt had just as much influence on Wilson as the other way around. It's not a coincidence that PT's sound started to change after Wilson produced Blackwater Park in 2001. They are kindred souls as JoeF. mentioned above.

 

Yes, you guys get it.