It’s so bizarre that I can listen to a 1 hour album with tracks going from 2 minutes to 5 and enjoy it; but I just can’t listen to a 1 hour album with songs going from 7 to 10 minutes. So I was kind of bored just by looking at the extension of the first two tracks in this record, both more than 10 minutes long.

Ghost Reveries is a good album, with great musicianship and some very good ideas and feelings, but is just too long, the songs are just too long and the changes of styles inside every track are totally unnecessary, they could have very easily cut the songs where the tempo and the guitars changed their style and speed and have a 15 or 16 track album, and it will have been way better than to listen to a 10 minute up and down song.

This new album has the best Opeth can offer and the worst; lest talk about the best: The drum work is impeccable, it keeps resonating on the background helping the guitars achieve a sort of mystical feeling and getting brutal and fast at some points just to keep you waiting for more (the brutal parts are not really brutal, but after listening to 3 minutes of acoustic guitars and mellow keyboards, every growl is welcome and every double bass feels like heaven).

The clean vocals are performed with finesse and the growls are very death metal (some love Mikael Åkerfeldt and others just hate his voice); the keyboards play a bigger role this time around, and the acoustic guitar is nicely played and has some nice things to say.

This album has a great production and mixing behind it, everything sounds so clear and beautiful but the length, the length, the length of the songs is something that is very hard to endure even though these guys really know what they are doing with their instruments.

The worst thing about Ghost Reveries is like I keep saying, the length of some songs, and the weird changes of styles in those gigantic songs, and example of this is “The Baying of The Hounds” is a good song that looks like three songs placed together, the best part of the song really begins by the end of the track at 1:30 minutes remaining, and there is a big fill of instrumental use between the beginning and that great 1:30. That formula is used too often, but those tiny little moments of great music really save this album from mediocrity and transformed into a great piece of musicianship, Opeth just have to start saying NO to some long passages that really don’t contribute to anything more than the length of the album.