I dont know if this has been posted before, but here is a review of morningrise from Satan Stole My Teddybear:
"Opeth, the pioneers of kitsch and aimless pretention in black metal. Morningrise best exemplifies their stunning incapacity to arrange - not necessarily to compose - and quite predictably is swallowed whole by "melodic metal" enthusiasts with a penchant for worshipping anything this blatantly gimmicky. There are certainly some redeeming points, but they tend to go unnoticed, mostly because this album is about thirty minutes too long and so full of itself that mediocrity begins to seem like incompetence when it keeps getting repeated for what seems like hours on end.
"Advent", for example. A jumble of ideas, it is a messy collection of a million different apathetic riffs without any clear climax, direction. There's a nice riff, then a little break - maybe an acoustic interlude - and then a riff that might have come from any of their other songs, or albums, for that matter. Some of the songwriting seems forceful, and laced with subtle contrivances that tend to strip it of its emotional content because of its inability to absorb me: if the music bothers me, I tend to view it objectively, from the outside, and then the other flaws come crashing in from the periphery onto the centre stage.
There are often a lot of abrupt stops, and they're sometimes followed by acoustic picking patterns with off-key clean vocals. They're somewhat well done on the first two songs, but by the time "Nectar" is done, so is the creativity the band is able to exercise. "Black Rose Immortal" is intolerably boring and "To Bid You Farewell" is almost as bad. The vocals are rather generic, but there is a lot of potential in what the lead singer would be able to accomplish if he tried to sing in key. The production is fine, though the guitar sound is not quite thick enough to have a charismatic definition.
I'm not willing to say that Opeth are untalented, that would be rather inaccurate. Without any doubt, there's a lot of catchy riffage all over the place, and some of the acoustic inteludes are even pleasantly "atmospheric". "Advent" and "Night and the Silent Water" are nice listens, and if taken just as a collection of riffs tend to even be enjoyable. If only they had not tried to bite off more than they could chew, and edited out most of the pointless meandering, this would've been decent. They need to learn that composing "epics" takes a lot more than plastering guitar parts onto a conceptual rag doll of a song."
Loser
"Opeth, the pioneers of kitsch and aimless pretention in black metal. Morningrise best exemplifies their stunning incapacity to arrange - not necessarily to compose - and quite predictably is swallowed whole by "melodic metal" enthusiasts with a penchant for worshipping anything this blatantly gimmicky. There are certainly some redeeming points, but they tend to go unnoticed, mostly because this album is about thirty minutes too long and so full of itself that mediocrity begins to seem like incompetence when it keeps getting repeated for what seems like hours on end.
"Advent", for example. A jumble of ideas, it is a messy collection of a million different apathetic riffs without any clear climax, direction. There's a nice riff, then a little break - maybe an acoustic interlude - and then a riff that might have come from any of their other songs, or albums, for that matter. Some of the songwriting seems forceful, and laced with subtle contrivances that tend to strip it of its emotional content because of its inability to absorb me: if the music bothers me, I tend to view it objectively, from the outside, and then the other flaws come crashing in from the periphery onto the centre stage.
There are often a lot of abrupt stops, and they're sometimes followed by acoustic picking patterns with off-key clean vocals. They're somewhat well done on the first two songs, but by the time "Nectar" is done, so is the creativity the band is able to exercise. "Black Rose Immortal" is intolerably boring and "To Bid You Farewell" is almost as bad. The vocals are rather generic, but there is a lot of potential in what the lead singer would be able to accomplish if he tried to sing in key. The production is fine, though the guitar sound is not quite thick enough to have a charismatic definition.
I'm not willing to say that Opeth are untalented, that would be rather inaccurate. Without any doubt, there's a lot of catchy riffage all over the place, and some of the acoustic inteludes are even pleasantly "atmospheric". "Advent" and "Night and the Silent Water" are nice listens, and if taken just as a collection of riffs tend to even be enjoyable. If only they had not tried to bite off more than they could chew, and edited out most of the pointless meandering, this would've been decent. They need to learn that composing "epics" takes a lot more than plastering guitar parts onto a conceptual rag doll of a song."
Loser
