I haven't heard Novembre yet, but in defense of Emperor's Prometheus album, it is one of those that requires repeated exposures to the album as a whole in order to fully appreciate. Downloading a few songs probably won't provide you with a very clear idea of the album, as a lot of its power is derived from the overall context of the album as a whole. Frankly, I think that applies equally to In The Nightside Eclipse and Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, though perhaps to a lesser extent on IX Equilibrium, where the songs seem to possess more of a "stand-alone" quality.
I do agree, however, that Prometheus is not as strikingly original as certain people maintain, although it certainly does contain more than its fair share of innovation and is, in my eyes, nearly flawless in composition. Ihsahn's intention, as far as I understand it, was to create an album that reflected the band's past musical achievements, while also finding ways to push it further. These two things exist together on the album, so searching for or expecting an album that will revolutionize the genre is perhaps to misunderstand the intentions behind the album's creation.
FYI (shameless plug time), my understanding for this comes from an interview that I did with Ihsahn just prior to the release of Prometheus. It was initially published in article format in Unrestrained! #17, but I will publish the original question-and-answer transcript in the next edition of the Chaotic Critiques email newsletter, as there is a lot of info which emerged during the course of our conversation that, for space reasons or ensuring a degree of narrative coherence in the article, was not included in the Unrestrained! piece. I did something similar with my interview with Mikael of Opeth a few months ago, and it was quite well-received on this very forum.
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