my complaint is that it fails, at least partially anyway, at being journey music. a journey requires coherence kind of by definition, and the same goes for sustaining or developing a mood - obviously jarring transitions can sometimes serve a conceptual purpose but in opeth's case they just don't have an instinct for flow, nor do they have quality control, nor the humility to recognise their own limitations etc (all of which is true of most prog metal when compared to prog rock and/or trad metal, let's face it). i think they matured into somewhat less crude songwriters after this album, but they also slowly started to run out of good ideas unfortunately.
but w/e, none of this mattered to me when i was 14 and i'm not sure i've ever been so deeply moved by music before or since. this album (all the first five really) will always have a place in my heart.
Seriously, the fact that the number of new metal albums which I really do enjoy has declined drastically since the middle of the nineties might partly be due to a change of my musical preferences (also away from metal), though there are still quite a lot of albums - mostly from the second half of the eighties - I still enjoy listening to. Another reason is probably that as regards subgenres I generally do like (or used to like), when I listen to some new stuff, I mostly get the impression that it's already been done better before and I'm not willing (anymore) to spend my money on albums which will only get a few spins and then never be listened to again (as it did happen in the eighties and also nineties). When I buy an album nowadays, it usually gets a lot of spins, and not just over a period of a couple of weeks or a few months, which might also explain why 3 out of my 4 most-played albums have been released after 2000.
I love everything on this list, such a bonkers year
