day, but those silhouette ones were the best." Layout The band already had one issue with album about the mastering of "Requiem" (see Recording and production), a second problem arose with the album: the lyric pages were the opposite to what Opeth had expected. The colours had been reversed, and the CD itself was blue instead of black. The band again expressed regret for this, but fans stated they liked how the colours looked. After finishing the layout, the band sent the album to England. Reception Critical reaction to the album was mostly positive. Critic Matt Smith of Maelstrom said that it is one of the best Opeth albums, and "it set the tone for the albums to come". However, before Orchids release, according to Åkerfeldt: John Serba of AllMusic said that Orchid was "quite an audacious release, a far-beyond-epic prog/death monstrosity exuding equal parts beauty and brutality – an album so brilliant, so navel-gazingly pretentious that, in retrospect, Opeth's future greatness was a foregone conclusion". John Chedsey of Satan Stole My Teddybear stated that the album is "one of the more stunning and devastatingly powerful debuts of any metal band in any genre." Jim Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess wrote that "perhaps the most easily recognizable voice in all of extreme metal, Mikael Åkerfeldt really does make some noise in his debut. I can't think of very many vocalists in 1994 (when the album was recorded) who used both clean and growled vocals freely. I'm definitely not going to go so far as to say he was the first (Dan Swanö did beat him on that at least!) but all those years ago, Åkerfeldt did set the standard for what the extreme progressive music vocalist should sound like". He added, "The fact is this album is a groundbreaking milestone in heavy metal for the progressive elements that are thrown into the more metallic music and the extreme vocals" and the sound of the album is "completely unique". Chris Dick of Decibel stated in Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces:Precious Metal, p. 246 Not all critics were positive, however. French magazine Metallian said the album was "boring and uneventful" and gave it 1/10. Johan De Farfalla stated that "from the death metal scene, they thought, 'Wow! This is cool!' From the educated musicians I knew, they said, 'This sucks. The sound is bad.