HERITAGE

When a new Opeth album is released, I feel a tentative mixture of invigorating excitement, nostalgia, hesitancy, and preparation for disappointment. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're an Opeth fan, so perhaps you can relate to the following sentiment. Please excuse an autobiographical note.

My introductory Opeth album was Damnation. In retrospect, I think that I was at the end of my heavy metal years, and open to something new, which could incorporate a greater range of stylistic elements and broaden my musical tastes. In this sense, Opeth turned out to simultaneously be an enormous breath of fresh air, and a solid payload of the musical styles I already knew I loved, as well as confronting me with challenging new sounds that I wasn't receptive to at first. After falling in love with Damnation, I backtracked to Still Life (a great masterpiece), Blackwater Park, Morningrise, and subsequently the rest of their discography, which at that time, only extended to Deliverance.

Upon the release of Ghost Reveries, I was quite sorely disappointed. A friend played for me some of his favorite moments, and I felt nothing. I could not detect a single carefully crafted melody in the entire album. The guitars seemed simplistic at times, and many songs were empty and boring. It was experimental, even for Opeth, and I was skeptical of the more liberal use of keyboards, uncharacteristic vocal styles, and strange musical modes and scales, edging toward a major/blues/gospel feel at times.

I wrote the album off for a short time, then revisited it. I listened to it carefully from beginning to end, and found that while it did not compare to the caliber of Opeth's previous work, it had a few shining moments. Time passed. I listened more. I realized that there were more quality tracks than I'd first noticed. This caused me to descend into a behavior of "album worship" which possesses me from time to time, where I listened exclusively to Ghost Reveries, and explored each track in detail. I emerged from this beautiful exploratory time with a new album to love, a little humility, and, I hope, a little wisdom.

My reaction to Watershed was quite similar, but it has taken more time to gain a less deep appreciation. I am almost certain to still be adjusting to it, and my feelings will continue to change. You may know this already, but I have learned that absorbing a new album can be a slow and unpredictable experience, and that first impressions may ultimately have little relevance.

Having made this disclaimer, and having only listened to the album twice, in it's entirety, uninterrupted, I can only report my initial impressions. The album is so dense, confusing, unstructured, bizarre and abominable as to be intimidating. After long and wearying stretches of incomprehensible alternating guitar riffs, which made me feel as though I was falling and spinning through the bowels of a giant malfunctioning clock, I would occasionally be teased with a beautiful melodic reprieve, only to have this ripped away almost instantly, and I may say quite predictably, by another disharmonious guitar riff of an odd number of notes, which would loop repetitively. Compared to veritable oldies, such as Blackwater Park, Damnation, Morningrise, or especially Still Life, Heritage seems much less thoughtful, much less composed, much less meticulously crafted. As a lifelong lover of guitar, I was disappointed at an apparent total lack of accomplished and beautifully written leads, and I mourned the lack of deep layered harmonies which Opeth has conditioned me to expect. As long as the music flows nicely, I don't need to know where one track ends and another begins, but the entire album felt like an unorganized and hideous pile of broken cogs and springs being dragged through my brain for no purpose. Interestingly, this is only mostly a bad thing. The hallucinogenic, trip-like quality of the album was perhaps one of it's most hopeful features. Some of these complaints are applicable to varying degrees to other recent Opeth releases, and I am curious to see whether they dissipate in time. One positive effect of the schizophrenic structure of the album was to encourage the me to exist in the moment with the music, trying to channel the feeling of whatever was playing as I heard it, as I knew it would inevitably be discontinued shortly, and replaced with one of a few simple possibilities, including a fairly simplistic looping acoustic guitar line, scratchy and nervous sounding guitars looping in an unusual time signature, a pretty but short lived piano piece, or a few others. Because it's such a convoluted mess of notes and drums, the album does have a dark and mysterious quality to it, which makes me want to listen and listen, trying to untangle the chaos and form a mental map of the music, so as not to be disillusioned by what seem like multiple hectic and confusing routes to nowhere. It occurs to me that if this album inspires in me such vivid and descriptive notions, it may be artistically rich.

My main reaction to Heritage has been that Opeth has deliberately veered so far from the mainstream so as to lose sight of the musical principles which have always distinguished them. A melodic and beautiful passage is much more striking when dynamically contrasted by a powerful, aggressive, and energetic guitar line. This kind of synergy is not possible when the album is entirely homogeneous. An attention-grabbing and strange musical section is only attention grabbing and strange if it stands out amongst the rest of the music, but this is not possible when one hour's worth of similarly unusual and quaint guitar lines are simply strung together on a record. It is shocking to realize that Heritage is actually very narrow, and does not encompass a plush range of musical styles like virtually every other Opeth album. These elements of musical composition, namely, dynamics, synergy, surprise, thoughtful composition, etc., seem sadly to have gone ignored in Heritage, which has instead, while trying desperately to be different, committed the same sin as many mainstream pop albums.

While this review may come across as overtly negative, I must emphasize that I can already feel the gravitational lure of certain tracks pulling me in. "I Feel the Dark" is a high point toward the beginning of the album, but much of it's appeal is probably rooted in it's comparative orthodoxy. "Haxprocess" has begun to impress it'self on me as a track which may have genuine merit. While "Folklore" shares the unfamiliar character that defines Heritage, it is an overwhelmingly positive quality for this track. This song showcases strangeness in a most positive way; Bizarre, but also immediately likeable, it's beauty is accentuated by it's weirdness, which makes it exotic, and all the more beloved. I expect that as I sift through Heritage, I will find more and more gems.

In the meantime, I'll keep listening, to see what I find in that dark smoky pile of notes and sounds, drums and words, cogs and springs. Opeth seems to never deliver what I want or expect, but instead hands over a dense and mysterious entanglement. A musical puzzle cube, waiting to be opened.