IN CAUDA VENENUM

Opeth

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

4.00 | 560 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Isaac Peretz

Oh no. Oh no no no no... The repetitive songs are back! Everyone run!!!

You see, there's something that I never liked about Blackwater Park and it was how every song is two minutes long but it gets overextended to nine or ten minutes, it becomes incredibly tedious and unnecessary, plus the songs really don't have a reason to be that long in the first place. Ghost Reveries and Watershed slightly solved this problem by being more dynamic and then Heritage along with Pale Communion decimated it.

But of course there just had to be a moment where this type of song would return, and that moment was inside In Cauda Venenum.

Heck. Take a look at The Garroter, it's two minutes of original music triplicated for no reason at all. It has no reason to be this long because there's no sort of build up along the track. Heart In Hand, Charlatan, Universal Truth and Next Of Kin suffer from this situation and it makes a full listen truly painful, just like in Blackwater Park.

Now, there's some tracks that deserve to be as long as they are like Dignity and All Things Will Pass, the latter one being absolutely amazing, but that's because it has an actual build up. So there's still some good stuff here and there.

One thing noticing is that this is Opeth's heaviest album since Watershed. It doesn't have growls but its metal guitars really bring it up in terms of heaviness.

But why am I giving this album two stars? Two stars stands for "fans only" and that's exactly what I think about it. I've been an Opeth fan for around eight years and it took me around five (very long) full listens. And even after that, the reward wasn't that valuable.

Just not an album that I go back to. I still believe Heritage is the best Opeth album of the new era.

Two stars.

Isaac Peretz | 2/5 | 2021-3-7

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