Album Review: Storm Corrosion - Storm Corrosion

After a dozen years of playing in each other's backyards, Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree) and Mikael  Åkerfeldt (Opeth) have finally met in the middle for their first full-blown creative collaboration. While it's been highly-anticipated, it's unlikely that many would've fathomed its eventual direction. Opting to leave their progressive rock and metal trappings at the door, the two have decided to pay tribute to their own diverse record collections and sincerely pursued this course with a rare sense of scope and subtlety.

Opener Drag Rope is the closest the album comes to sounding like an amalgamation of both party's previous outings, and thus eases into the challenging terrain. From here on in, any such moments of fleeting familiarity have all but completely fled, and we're abandoned to a contemplative course of melody. Wilson's gentle voice glides over the fragile folk meanderings of Åkerfeldt's guitar on the lengthy Title track. A ghostly body of ambience pervades this scene midway, and then opens itself further, to reveal a host of discordant, non-musical sounds creeping through its ethereal cadaver. There's minimal use of distortion or percussion throughout, yet they manage to invoke a sense of heaviness through a creative application of drawn-out melodies, which are both genuinely disturbing and sorrowful. There is, however, an infinite source of beauty occupying the same space, and on closer Ljudet Innan this becomes painfully evident, as the poles mutually manifest into an exquisite lamentation, which delicately trails out on a long wind toward its graceful conclusion.

While it's not likely to please the bulk of fans, Storm Corrosion invites an intimate attentiveness and rewards such with a daring opus that slips beyond the confining concepts of success.