Note from author: After three-and-a-half years and almost 180 editions, Retro Recommendation will be closing up shop. Will it continue on? Who knows. If it does, I’m confident that it will be just fine. I want to thank Chad for giving me an opportunity to provide a weekly column for the site, all the musicians and writers who have contributed to the column (you all are amazing and have my respect forever), and anybody who has ever read this column.

Whether you perused through one or two years ago or have followed it every week since the beginning, it has meant a lot to me. Doing this column has been one of the highlights of my music writing career.

As a critic, I always held firm to the belief that the writer was not to inject his or herself directly into their writing. It should be about the music, not the writer. That meant avoiding phrases like “I” and “me.” I kept to that standard since I started this column, but this edition is unique. This is the last one I’ll ever write. There will be no reunion tour or a rebirth six months down the line. For me, this is it. The final cut. The home stretch. Some other generic phrase.

However, this is not meant to be a sappy goodbye or a drawn-out finale. I could have easily gone down memory lane and told you about the best moments I’ve had doing Retro Recommendation. The list is long and would probably bore the hell out of you anyway. So this week still has an album, which you already know about if you read the title.

I’ll still inject my thoughts on it, but this go-around, it’ll have more of a personal touch.

“But Dan,” you may be saying out loud to your computer screen. “Ghost Reveries can’t be considered retro. Hell, it isn’t even a decade old.” All that yelling at your screen is not in vain, as you would be correct. So maybe I’m cheating a little bit with this edition, but there is a reason for that. Without Ghost Reveries, there would be no Retro Recommendation.

How can that be? How can one album totally shape 100,000 words (yes, that’s how many I’ve written all together for this column) over the course of three-plus years? It’s because without Ghost Reveries, I would never be the metal fan I am today. While Metallica was the first metal band I ever got into, Opeth was the true catalyst that began my slow ascension into the more dissonant side of metal.

As a teenager, I was a thrash head. My neck went numb more times than I can remember thanks to Metallica, Megadeth, Exodus, and Anthrax (Slayer came much later, as the cover to Reign in Blood scared the crap out of me as a Satan-fearing child). I saw no need to get into other genres, satisfied with cranking Master of Puppets on repeat every day, but Ghost Reveries changed that. Well, more specifically, “Ghost of Perdition.”

“Ghost of Perdition” was the first Opeth song I heard, back in the golden age of MySpace. It took Mikael Akerfeldt growling “Ghost of Mother, lingering death” for me to fall in love. That’s about 15 seconds into the song, an impressive feat for any band to accomplish. The rest of the ten minutes was spent with my jaw stuck in a wide-open position.

What got to me was how the band took the principles of ‘70s progressive rock and meshed it with death metal. To my young ears, that was something unusual, but what was surprising was how easy it was to get into. Having movements throughout the song that went from a calm, retrospective feel to an uproarious frenzy of double bass drums and disjointed riffing was revolutionary, considering I was trapped in my tiny thrash bubble.

I rushed out and brought the album soon after, and that was all I needed to spark the side of me that couldn’t get enough of extreme music. If it had harsh vocals, I was all over it. Eventually, that led to me writing about music, joining this fine web site, starting Retro Recommendation, and writing way too many of these.

Ask an Opeth fan what their favorite album is, and you’re likely to get a large majority yelling Blackwater Park in your face. I’ve had this happen to me a few times, and after wiping the spit from my cheeks, I give them the answer of Ghost Reveries. Usually, it gets a response of “Oh, that one is pretty good,” but Blackwater Park is considered the benchmark record of their career.

Ghost Reveries was my first Opeth album, which has something to do with my eternal affection for it. However, even after hearing the rest of their discography, the answer hasn’t changed. From the evil vibes of “The Grand Conjuration” to the melancholy closer “Isolation Years,” the band was at a creative high mark that they haven’t been able to replicate yet.

The album was also the end of an era for the band, as drummer Martin Lopez and guitarist Peter Lindgren - two integral parts of some of the best albums they produced - departed after its release. Though Akerfeldt will always be the creative center of Opeth, losing Lopez and Lindgren did hurt the band somewhat. The follow-up Watershed was solid, but nowhere near the pristine quality of Ghost Reveries.

If there is something I have taken away from writing this column all these years, it’s that there is so much amazing music out there that isn’t as widely known as it should be. With the Internet, we have the power to locate what was once lost to us. In a culture where mainstream music has mostly become sterile, it’s remarkable to be able to search for recordings that haven’t been shoved in our faces, like a black metal demo from 1992 or a doom metal EP from 1979.

Don’t ever waste that opportunity. You might find a record that holds a special meaning to you, like Ghost Reveriesdoes for me. For opening my ears to something that has helped to define me as a music lover, Ghost Reveries gets the nod for the final Retro Recommendation (that I’ll ever write, at least).

Opeth - "Ghost Of Perdition' Live Video