Orchid/Morningrise - cohesiveness

[Nico]

Okay, it's a common trend around here to label Orchid and Morningrise the 'fragmented', 'disjointed' and 'uncohesive' releases. I beleive this is totaly full of shit. Orchid flows better than any of the releases in my opinion. The melodies have smooth transitions. The acoustic interludes, being more infrequent than later albums, are strategicaly placed for maximum effect. It's all very good.

Most people's problem with Morningrise is Black Rose Immortal. Yes, it's a little sketchy at times, it's more like 2-3 songs than one large one... but just think; what if it had been titled like this:

4) Black Rose Immortal
i) Spiritual Eclipse
ii) The Calmness of a Whisper
iii) The Amaranth Symbol

Personaly, I don't think anyone would be complaining if it were titled like this. As far as I can tell from the lyrics, the song is meant to be a single story, I consider each 'fragment' to be a different chapter.

Also, people must remember that Black Rose is only about 1/3 of the album. The rest of the songs are all very well structured, and are very efficient at driving emotion (ie. Night and Silent Water).


Keep in mind also, that most of the material for Orchid and Morningrise was written between 92-95. That's a hell of a long time to structure the songs the way they should be done. Deliverance, on the other hand, was mostly written in the studio under tremendous pressure over several weeks. How you people can think that Deliverance is more coheisve than Orchid to me remains a mystery.

 

[Ermz]

You do drive quite an interesting point there. I think the distinction between Deliverance and Orchid in terms of cohesiveness is that one is inherently simpler and more straight-forward, maintaining a similar sound throughout songs whilst the other has frequent melody shifts which may not be well enough bridged to give a feeling of continuity.

I find that with the early material there are abrupt stops, numerous drum fills and count-ins all trying to compensate for lack of fluid bridging. We even see with the early demo material that it was all writen as seperated riffs... some of which were taken to constitute Advent. We can conjecture, by drawing from the Opeth Documentary, that the recent releases, despite being rushed, have more flow because Mikael wrote most of the material in that single period of time, and usually with teh whole song in mind. Reffer back to the documentary where Mikael is showing Steve the major parts of A Fair Judgement. He had the main two chords, the big lead in riff with the melody already in mind, and not only that but the long acoustic-interlude section down too.

It's pretty easy to see that Mikael is a more fluid songwriter these days. Despite the time constraints causing the material to sound somewhat more sterile than the saturated melodic work of the early releases, it still flows better because he wrote it with the majority of the song in mind.

You can basically re-arrange the riffs in Orchid to form completely different songs, and nothing would sound out-of-place... well at least not any more than it does now .

 

[Eriel]

Both excellent points. I think Orchid has superior sound elements, atmosphere, and lyrics, but a rather unstable foundation for each song. But Deliverance is like the opposite: each song is whole and the sounds all are developed and structured within such a short period of time that there was less ill fitting parts.

I don't really know anything about music except whether it sounds good to my ears or not, but I know writing and if you write something for several years you get a lot of disjointed ideas you have to make fit into each other. A lot of things are scrapped, re-written, edited with a different angle, a different viewpoint, whatever. It's similar in that sense. Deliverance had less time to be disjoined, that's why it's sound is so cohesive, but (I believe) has less of the disjointed riffs, interludes, and melodies that actually make Orchid so interesting. Soo...

Whether one is greater than the other is up to the listener, I think.

 

[RavenousDaemon]

Just because they took from 92-95 to write all of the material for Orchid and Morningrise doesn't mean those two albums are better composed than Deliverance and Damnation. Keep in mind that Opeth was still a fledgling band at that point, and so wasn't as experienced at all this band-stuff as they are now. Also, didn't Mike have alot of the material written for the last two before they went into the studio? I know there was plenty unwritten, but at least it was a start.

 

[Nico]

The point is, years of meticulous practice and construction has this strange tendency to yeild better results than its rushed counterpart.

 

[Dreadful]

Well I agree that Deliverance flows better than the majority of the material off Orchid and Morningrise. However, personally to me I like the style/songs of the early albums the best so it makes the album better for me. They were more imaginable, atmospheric, emotional to me...just listening to something like Twilight is my robe or In the Mist she was standing touches my soul because of the clean tones(all that reverb haha) and just the musical theme of the album. To each his own when it comes to taste really, I like the early stuff better...but Mikael did stop that whole "cut and paste" thing and prefers to write more structured nowadays. That's not a problem at all, you can't recreate the old albums.

 

[MasterOLightning]

Morningrise gets a bad rap as far as the continuity goes. TBYF and TNATSW sound as if they were written to be what they were, rather than a collection of riffs. Advent is pieced together, as we all know, but they did a damn good job of it. BRI has some problems too, but if looked at as different chapters, it really makes a difference. The only poorly done song is Nectar.

I can't give Orchid such high marks in this area. The Twilight is my Robe, although my favorite song from the album, has some parts that are just so out of nowhere, that you have to believe they were intentionally made so. There's stuff like the error in between Requiem and TAIT. This probably wouldn't have been so, had there been some correlation between the the two parts that are supposed to be Requiem. As great as Orchid is, a more experienced Opeth could have made that album better by improving transitions.

 

[Nico]

^And a more experience Opeth, in my opinion, could not have acheived such great delivery of melody and emotion. But that's a different topic all together...

 

[Demoke]

In my opinion a lot of the Opeth charm comes from the fact that the changes from some parts to others come unexpectedly. That's maybe the reason I like the early albums a bit more, as it takes you more effort to predict what's coming next. In Deliverance the amount of different riffs within a song is lower and the repetition as a whole, higher. If you call this cohesiveness, so be it; however, it doesn't compare with the earlier albums, which are "growers." Still, my favourite Opeth CD has got a bit of both: it's more unpredictable and has some more cohesiveness than the earlier albums, and that one is called Still Life.

 

[Protected Witness]

In my opinion a lot of the Opeth charm comes from the fact that the changes from some parts to others come unexpectedly. That's maybe the reason I like the early albums a bit more, as it takes you more effort to predict what's coming next. In Deliverance the amount of different riffs within a song is lower and the repetition as a whole, higher. If you call this cohesiveness, so be it; however, it doesn't compare with the earlier albums, which are "growers." Still, my favourite Opeth CD has got a bit of both: it's more unpredictable and has some more cohesiveness than the earlier albums, and that one is called Still Life.

Yeah, but once you listen to it enough times, you know what's going to happen anyway, no matter which album it is. So then, they just become songs that you know.

The obvious answer for the division between fans of the first few albums and fans of the later albums is that Opeth has evolved quite a bit over their 14 years. Thank goodness they are not AC/DC.

I'm not going to worry about why other people don't like the first two records. That's their problem.

 

[Ermz]

Yep, they certainly nailed that gray area with Still Life. Brilliant album. Weirdest riffs and composition/structuring I've yet to see in a 'metal' album.

 

[Demoke]

Yeah, but once you listen to it enough times, you know what's going to happen anyway, no matter which album it is. So then, they just become songs that you know.

Yes, but you need fewer listens to get a bit bored of Deliverance. Actually, i have to admit I don't listen to a lot of Opeth these days, at least not as much as I did before, so you got a point there. I personally have enjoyed more the first four albums.

 

[The Dude]

The only two songs I could listen to on repeat for all eternity without ever getting bored of would be Epilogue and Deliverence, both of which are quite repetitive songs. Repetition does not always equal boring.

 

[Protected Witness]

Yes, but you need fewer listens to get a bit bored of Deliverance.

Subjective

 

[Eriel]

Morningrise gets a bad rap as far as the continuity goes. TBYF and TNATSW sound as if they were written to be what they were, rather than a collection of riffs. Advent is pieced together, as we all know, but they did a damn good job of it. BRI has some problems too, but if looked at as different chapters, it really makes a difference. The only poorly done song is Nectar.

I can't give Orchid such high marks in this area. The Twilight is my Robe, although my favorite song from the album, has some parts that are just so out of nowhere, that you have to believe they were intentionally made so. There's stuff like the error in between Requiem and TAIT. This probably wouldn't have been so, had there been some correlation between the the two parts that are supposed to be Requiem. As great as Orchid is, a more experienced Opeth could have made that album better by improving transitions.

And I still do enjoy Nectar. Though I recognize your point. Morningrise can sound really piecemeal to me, but some of those pieces are brilliant. 6:52-8:50 is a nice "piece" in Nectar.

For some reason Orchid seems more even. Maybe that is because of Black Rose Immortal being moved to Morningrise instead of being on Orchid. BRI could be more than three songs, it seems like six or so mini-songs all wrapped up together. My favorite part is the interlude at the very middle of the song, somewhere near 9:00, where he sings: "Eyes attached to your mute portrait ... Sunbirds leave their dark recesses, shadows fill the archways, do not turn your face towards me..." Then that acoustic passage ends a minute later. But that particular interlude is only two or so minutes long. Which is a similar length as most of their interludes. It has the same sort of structure as their other works, but with simply more pieces to it, which is part of the reason why it seems so uneven. And there are a lot of "out of nowhere" changes, but I think Opeth still does incorporate that style even in their newer work.

They have learned to write songs as whole instead of a collection of riffs, and to incorporate more of an overall theme or sound, and return to it more often than they did before. But there has been a loss of emotive quality in that. I can't say I have any preferences for one ideal over the other when I look at it more objectively.

And I think that all the albums are of such near-equal brilliance that the point is moot anyway.

 

[Ermz]

I like to think that Opeth would reach a point of brilliance if they were able to hit a point where the songwriting - being as cohesive, and thematic as that of newer releases - would actually return to the saturated melodic work of the past. Just because songs get more structured doesn't necessitate them becoming sterile aswell. So, here's to high hopes for the next release.

 

[The Dude]

So, here's to high hopes for the next release.

Word.

 

[Eriel]

Yeah, what he said.

And about songs becoming more structured having less emotion: that's just a general tendency I've noticed. I don't think they are actually that related to each other than it seems. Some parts of Deliverance mirror strong emotions, but it's easy to forget that because the drumming can sound mechanical/technical and feels less emotive than a guitar's sound.

 

[Ermz]

Well the mechanical aesthetics of the album would probably be due in large part to the production. It's fairly easy for a producer to make any drummer sound tight and like a machine, with the right amount of compression and drumagog-ing. But I suppose the material itself has this very 'tight' feel about it. Best example of course being the end of Deliverance. But with that, there are also some really cool parts on deliverance, like the intro to 'By the Pain I See In Others' and those cool effects and carnival music somewhere in the middle.

 

[spigot]

The ending of deliverance is the only time they stayed with a riff too long. It is the only part of a song by Opeth that I dislike. The worst thing about it is that as the rest of the song is still awesome, I hate to skip it.