So when I say I'm an Opeth fan, I mean the same thing that I think most people mean when they say they're an Opeth fan - I really, really, really like mid-era Opeth. Everything from Still Life through Ghost Reveries is just pure grade-A progressive metal gold. I've never been the biggest fan of Watershed, though I have enjoyed it in the past, but it's their last several albums that have been controversial for their fanbase and less appealing to me personally.
Listen, I do believe that progressive rock Opeth can be just as good as progressive death metal Opeth. I know this because they've proven it before - that album is right over here and it stands alongside Blackwater Park and Ghost Reveries for me, personally. But Heritage never struck any chord with me whatsoever (it's been a decade so it might these days). Pale Communion comes the closest and I think it's genuinely great, but it's never quite stuck with me as much as some of their other albums. So here we come to Sorceress. There's an intro, then there's the first track, half of which I listened to when the album came out and then I decided I didn't really want to hear the rest of it. I thought about trying it again several times over the years but never really did - I think at one point I listened to all of Sorceress (the song) and then was like "eh".
But 2016 was a long time ago and my musical tastes have expanded a fair bit since then. I'm more open to listening to even heavier stuff than back then, but I'm just as likely to sit down and listen to Steven Wilson or Charles Mingus or Fleetwood Mac or something. You need a good variety of music on your plate, kids. So sitting down to listen to Sorceress now, after all these years of just ignoring it entirely, has made me change my mind a lot. Just saying "OK, I'm going to listen to this whole thing, without lamenting that the Opeth I knew and loved will never make another album like they did fifteen years ago, and instead just enjoy it for what it is".
And I did. A lot. A whole hell of a lot, actually, though I still think that the worst five seconds of Ghost Reveries is way better than the best of anything this album has to offer.
There's a lot of good grooves here. The title track is probably my favorite song on the album, oddly enough. It starts off with this really cool rhythm and never really stops jamming. After the intro, it dives into a slow, pounding, driving, loud as hell section that it dips into and out of for the rest of the song. It ain't Harlequin Forest... but it never will be, and I guess I knew that logically but I just never let it sink in.
Will O The Wisp is one of the softer songs on the album, mostly consisting of acoustic passages, and it's another one of my favorites on the album. About halfway through, Akerfeldt hums the melody, but it's layered in a way that feels really "full", really fills out the sound they're going for. At least for me. Chrysalis is the heaviest of the lot, but honestly I wouldn't categorize this album as metal.
Whether Opeth still counts as a metal band or not might still be up for debate in some places, but I don't think this album can, overall, be categorized as a metal album. It's prog rock with more "heavy" passages than normal - the album, at least as far as I can tell without looking at some actual measurements, spends more time in Will O The Wisp land than Chrysalis land. And, these days, I'm much more up for that than I was in 2016.
As far as complaints go, I think this album has two major problems - the first is that I think the mix is weird. I got used to it, and listening to it on really good headphones helps a lot, but it's very, very bass-y, especially in the heavier parts. The softer songs sound great, but the meatier, heavier parts kinda sound like mud sometimes. I feel like this album would have been way better if Akerfeldt had called up his old pal Steven Wilson to ask him about producing another album. That's just me throwing something out there, but something must have gone wrong somewhere. Everyone involved has produced way better sounding albums before, so what's up with this one? I mean, it's miles better than St. Anger or Jupiter, but The Raven That Refused To Sing this is not.
And the other, less prevalent, complaint is that there are a lot of filler songs in here. Persephone is a song you should just totally skip because it doesn't seem to serve any purpose, I cannot tell you anything about Sorceress 2 at all, and Persephone (Slight Return) is just 54 seconds. Why? In an album full of five plus minute songs, the majority of which have plenty of long mellow passages, I'm just at a loss as to why some of these couldn't have been mixed into something else or axed entirely.
And that's all I have to say about it right now. I'm glad I picked this album. I wound up liking it a whole lot more than I used to. I suppose I should sit down and listen to In Cauda Venenum at some point, an album I was aware of but I don't recall ever actually trying it. And re-listen to Heritage again, it's been a decade.
Also the rest of Opeth's stuff. Again. Because I'm pretty sure I'm going to die having recently listened to either Blackwater Park or Ghost Reveries.
I fucking love me some Opeth, man.
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