Style
Allmusic called Still Life a "formidable splicing of harsh, often jagged guitar riffs with graceful melodies".
Like most of the band's albums, Still Life features the combination of death metal and progressive rock elements that is characteristic of Opeth's music style. With this album, vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt's death growl began to deepen considerably relative to the band's earlier albums. Still Life continues the band's experimentation with dynamics, and most songs contain at least two drastic dynamic shifts. The song "Benighted" is the only acoustic track, containing a blues-influenced guitar solo. This is also one of the band's few songs that follow a linear song structure, containing verses and a chorus.
"Face of Melinda" is, for the most part, another ballad; while it does not contain death metal vocals, it does contain guitar riffs that are typical of the band's heavier songs. A fretless bass guitar along with brushes in place of conventional drumsticks were used in "Face of Melinda" to give it a jazzier sound.
Read more about this topic: Still Life (Opeth album)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)