Yeh, this belongs on the Opeth board

After many listens, this album is just OK in Opeth standards (if there is such thing, haha). It has some good moments but as stated in this thread before, its no Still Life.
 
Great album, but still think The Fall of Every Season is owning everything right now.

It's like Michael joined Anathema in 1996.


I'll have to check that out.

Watershed is not that great. Porcelain Heart and a couple of the others are pretty decent, but nothing like what they are capable of. They need to revisit some of their intensity I think, most of their recent stuff is lacking in that department. What I always liked about Opeth so much was the dichotomy between the intense and serene but now it's just the serene and the somewhat doomy, not much drive, and the serene parts suffer as well because of the lack of comparison. Lackluster.
 
I think Still Life is so overrated. If I were to list out my my favorite albums in order, Still Life would be dead last. I guess, according to John, I'm one of those "Morningrise bastards." When I first heard of Opeth, that was their current album. It's the first Opeth I ever heard and it blew me away. For that simple reason, nothing will ever top it. NOBODY was doing what Opeth was doing back in 1996. Everything they've done is great, but I'll never think another album is better than Morningrise because that album is the entire reason I love the band in the first place.

I agree that Lopez fit the band better. He just flowed perfectly through every part of every song, whereas Axe plays like a tense machine. Hopefully as he grows more accustomed to the band he starts to relax a bit and let his playing breathe with the music. He's definitely a great drummer.

This album is going to do whatever every Opeth album does: Start off amazing for the first couple months and after a while, just turn into another Opeth album.
 
i really like My Arms Your Hearse, but every time i try to listen to one of their other albums i get bored and change it. weeeeeird.
 
I think Still Life is so overrated. If I were to list out my my favorite albums in order, Still Life would be dead last. I guess, according to John, I'm one of those "Morningrise bastards." When I first heard of Opeth, that was their current album. It's the first Opeth I ever heard and it blew me away. For that simple reason, nothing will ever top it. NOBODY was doing what Opeth was doing back in 1996. Everything they've done is great, but I'll never think another album is better than Morningrise because that album is the entire reason I love the band in the first place.

I agree that Lopez fit the band better. He just flowed perfectly through every part of every song, whereas Axe plays like a tense machine. Hopefully as he grows more accustomed to the band he starts to relax a bit and let his playing breathe with the music. He's definitely a great drummer.

This album is going to do whatever every Opeth album does: Start off amazing for the first couple months and after a while, just turn into another Opeth album.

You have to remember that this is only Axe's first album with Opeth. My Arms, Your Hearse didn't have such a hot drumming performance from Lopez either, stiff and machine-like in much of the same way that Axe's drumming on this record is. That's not do say that I don't like that style of drumming, because it ends up making him sound a lot tighter live than Lopez did (even Mike's said that Lopez had many problems staying on tempo, always fluctuating throughout a song.)

Fwiw, I think Hessian Peel and Heir Apparent are definitely the best tracks on the album. Porcelain Heart is probably last imo. To me it's a lot more disjointed than any of the other songs and the re-introduction of a "The Grand Conjuration" theme was imo a bad songwriting decision.
 
Still Life > Morningrise > My Arms, Your Herse > Blackwater Park > Ghost Reveries > Watershed imo

Those are the most significant ones for me, although I love Orchid, but struggled fitting it in there.