Album: Heritage
Year: 2011
Line-Up:
Mikael Åkerfeldt: Vocals, Guitars
Per Wiberg: Keyboards, Hammond organ
Fredrik Åkesson: Guitars
Martin Axenrot: Drums
Martín Méndez: Bass
Sub-Genre: Psychedelic Rock
Progressive Rock
Peers form a big factor when determining the music you listen. So I was sort of a ridiculed person in the group of Opeth fans, when I claimed that I had not heard about them. Well, their reaction was something you would expect to see when you go to a grand prix and not know who Michael Schumacher is. This naturally aroused my curiosity, and I downloaded a couple of albums of the band, which includes this particular one. Well after listening to this album (Oh trust me I managed that feat), my initial reaction was like come on, what are these guys getting at? Agreed that they want to create some progressive music with folk influences, but these songs really get to nowhere, they have no structures and are disjointed. The music is something from 70’s progressive rock era, recycled Pink Floyd stuff with all the enjoyable elements and musical sense seeped out. Strictly speaking this is not a metal album, but we will forget this, shall we not, and I won’t be deducting any major points off for that. The lyrics are repetitive, though not bad poetically.
The vocalist is one of the worst I have ever heard. His voice is not steady, and lacks proper range. Well, people can adore his crooning and rant about how emotional it sounds, but come on almost all clean vocals backed with pianos or acoustic guitars sound that way. I can lay a wager that the ‘great’ Rob Flynn can sing similarly. Be proud Rob there is someone who sucks as much as you, if not more. No question arises about riff work as there is hardly much to note. The keyboard work is so-so. But I can see that it is more of the song writing error than faulty playing techniques in this area. The unstructured nature of the songs does lend too much help to the percussionist either as the drumming becomes disjointed. The production is fine, and the mix manages to merge all the instruments well.
Nothing much of note can be said of the individual songs. All of them are lost in a crescendo of folkish, proggish melodrama that has no idea in which direction its course is. The songs are not at all catchy, and that is a seriously bad. Ok I do not recommend that good music always be an Iron Maiden or Judas Priest. But then shouldn’t there be some interesting parts within the composition? Even the complex, disjoint epic A Pleasant Shade Of Grey achieves some moments coherence and structure and the parts flow superbly into each other. But here they do not, not even for a five minute song, leave aside the argument for a fifty four minute one. They have long instrumental sections just for the sake of having them. There is no real emotion involved. They start up just randomly anywhere and up randomly and then we are again treated to the awful crooning of that vocalist. Just when we begin to think positively about a particular idea (instrumental of course, the vocal melodies….), they follow it up with the most shitty and abominable composition ever heard. Either Mikael Suckerfeld pisses off on that with his abominable ‘emotional’ vocals, or the instrumental takes a very horrendous twist. The song writing does not really give much value to coherent pace and that is another terrible thing about this. But wait; don’t the German masters Mekong Delta achieve the same thing brilliantly? But Ralph Hubert has actual composition talent and Suckerfeldt sure as death does not. Credit given where credit due, I Fear The Dark and Nepenthe are descent compositions, and for once the instrumental sections work well; OK not well enough, there is always that part where you wish you could bash up that vocalist or the drummer out of frustration. Though in all this the problem of the utterly excretory vocals does not diminish. Folklore again works quite well, if you manage to sit out through the first half, which contains some of the worst vocals ever heard. The second half is good, and I admit good, because it is the only coherent part I remember from the album. For the rest of the tracks make sure you have a pillow with you while listening. You will never know when you drift into the boundless, imaginative world of dreams otherwise known as sleep. All of them are twisted in my memory as a single, disjoint track of horrible instrumentals and exponentially horrible vocals.
This album is a peak of how faulty and bad can composition go. Wrong influences and the idea of putting too many ideas stuffed into the little space found here and there within the lengths of the songs really makes the listener grate. Concluding, this album can be an excellent alternative to sleeping pills if you are not able to sleep, otherwise I can see no big reason to listen to this album, not even once.
Final rating: 19/100
