With hearing the new songs and listening again to the older albums, a certain evolution struck me most of all. I'm going to apply dialectic reasoning on this one:
We all agree that the first 2 albums (glorious as the were and still are) mainly consist of compositions in which different ideas were pasted together. This resulted in long but somewhat incoherent "songs", that perhaps could be considered more to tell a story.
With My Arms, Your Hearse one of the main changes was a development to real songs. This became even stronger on Still Life and reached a peak on Blackwater Park, on which the songs form a flowing, coherent whole. We might say that the song writing skills of Mikael improved drastically on those albums.
Then however a new change started which couldn't be noticed at the time being probably but is now in retrospect becoming clear. While Damnation is the ultimate expression of mere songwriting of the band Opeth, Deliverance started to show some more incoherence already, which added to a chaotic and dark feeling. This certainly continued on Ghost Reveries where every composition contains too many ideas to handle at once. Never however did this mean a return to the first 2 albums, but it was a new moving away from mere songwriting. This trend is becoming very clear now with Watershed (for which I'm sticking to the 3 released songs to discuss obviously) which apparently contains even more chaotic feelings and shows a strong diminishing of natural flow. This has lead to several threads already about how people don't like certain endings, or state that it's "disjointed" or that certain parts don't fit as well ...
Now, the first stage we could consider the thesis, with an almost complete lack of coherence and songwriting (brilliant as it was). The second stage then forms the antithesis in which Mikael became a very good songwriter (which can also be noticed in sideprojects he developed during this time). This was expressed most of all on Blackwater Park and Damnation, which explains their success with a bigger crowd.
The current stage then forms the synthesis in which all the gathered skills and experiences are being gathered and expressed in a new way. Mikael hasn't forgotten how to write decent songs and how to create compositions with a natural flow to it, but he ventures into new ways of using it and incorporates an experimental chaos in the compositions, which certainly are not at all a return to the patchwork of ideas, but do contain a lot of sudden changes, hooks, antipodes, and so on ...
This means that Watershed truely is a masterpiece and I consider this one the main expression of this phase in Opeth's development, in the same way as Morningrise was for the first phase, and Blackwater Park was for the second phase.
OK, let's see if this can spark a bit more mature discussion around here, and if this thread doesn't die so soon as the other nice debate threads.
We all agree that the first 2 albums (glorious as the were and still are) mainly consist of compositions in which different ideas were pasted together. This resulted in long but somewhat incoherent "songs", that perhaps could be considered more to tell a story.
With My Arms, Your Hearse one of the main changes was a development to real songs. This became even stronger on Still Life and reached a peak on Blackwater Park, on which the songs form a flowing, coherent whole. We might say that the song writing skills of Mikael improved drastically on those albums.
Then however a new change started which couldn't be noticed at the time being probably but is now in retrospect becoming clear. While Damnation is the ultimate expression of mere songwriting of the band Opeth, Deliverance started to show some more incoherence already, which added to a chaotic and dark feeling. This certainly continued on Ghost Reveries where every composition contains too many ideas to handle at once. Never however did this mean a return to the first 2 albums, but it was a new moving away from mere songwriting. This trend is becoming very clear now with Watershed (for which I'm sticking to the 3 released songs to discuss obviously) which apparently contains even more chaotic feelings and shows a strong diminishing of natural flow. This has lead to several threads already about how people don't like certain endings, or state that it's "disjointed" or that certain parts don't fit as well ...
Now, the first stage we could consider the thesis, with an almost complete lack of coherence and songwriting (brilliant as it was). The second stage then forms the antithesis in which Mikael became a very good songwriter (which can also be noticed in sideprojects he developed during this time). This was expressed most of all on Blackwater Park and Damnation, which explains their success with a bigger crowd.
The current stage then forms the synthesis in which all the gathered skills and experiences are being gathered and expressed in a new way. Mikael hasn't forgotten how to write decent songs and how to create compositions with a natural flow to it, but he ventures into new ways of using it and incorporates an experimental chaos in the compositions, which certainly are not at all a return to the patchwork of ideas, but do contain a lot of sudden changes, hooks, antipodes, and so on ...
This means that Watershed truely is a masterpiece and I consider this one the main expression of this phase in Opeth's development, in the same way as Morningrise was for the first phase, and Blackwater Park was for the second phase.
OK, let's see if this can spark a bit more mature discussion around here, and if this thread doesn't die so soon as the other nice debate threads.
