OPETH DISCOGRAPHY RANKING GAME - Still Life wins!

Mosh

Mosh

PM me your Opeth album rankings!
Staff member
Hey all! The skies are growing darker and the air is getting colder, which means it must be time for Maidenfans to talk about Opeth!

Here's how it works:

1: Each user will submit their rankings of the 13 Opeth studio albums to me via PM. The #1 album will receive 13 points, and #2 will receive 12, all the way down to #13 which will receive 1 point.

2: I will tally up the results and create a forum-wide ranking.

3: I will reveal the results one album at a time, starting at #13. This will be a more discussion based affair, since there will be no voting at this point.

So if you would like to participate, PM me your Opeth ranking from #1 (best) to #13 (worst). Any lists that ignore this format or don't include every Opeth studio album will be ignored! Any comments to this post with rankings will also be ignored, they must be sent via PM and no revisions!

You have until the end of the Metallica ranking game. I will do a "last call" when it's about to wrap up. I expect to start the game pretty much immediately after Metallica.

I want to give folks plenty of notice to revisit any albums they want, but I also want to get as many lists as possible so that we can get a more interesting ranking. If there are albums that you're less familiar with but still want to submit a list, now is your time to revisit those albums. But also if you rank an album last because you don't know it that well, I'm also not going to reject your list. I would rather you participate than not!

The Opeth discography for your reference:

Orchird
Morningrise
My Arms, Your Hearse
Still Life
Blackwater Park
Deliverance
Damnation
Ghost Reveries
Watershed
Heritage
Pale Communion
Sorceress
In Cauda Venenum
 
I was hoping to do a run-through before now but it just never materialized. Haven't heard every Opeth record so unless you decide to postpone another month I'll have to sit this one out, curious how it'll shake up though.
 
Diesel 11 said:
I was hoping to do a run-through before now but it just never materialized. Haven't heard every Opeth record so unless you decide to postpone another month I'll have to sit this one out, curious how it'll shake up though.
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Well definitely follow along with the thread so you can hear the albums from worst to best!
 
Hey, if my schedule is cleared out then I may, currently doing a Maiden listen that's taken up my time. I need to do a discography run at some point though, I promised a friend I would like 5-6 years ago and never finished it.
 
I love these games , but I have not listened to Opeth for about ten years, and I’m not familiar with the stuff before Blackwater park (I have given them a try, but that was a long time ago), so I’m not participating this time
 
It is now time to tabulate the results! Before we begin, our next game will be Black Sabbath. Feel free to submit lists now, I will post an official thread for this later, we will be sticking to the complete Black Sabbath studio discography.

This was a slightly lower participation game than the previous few, which probably comes as no surprise as Opeth is a lot more niche than the other bands I have been running games for. This resulted in a really unique list that I think will have more than a few surprises. It also led to some super tight results - just adding one more list could have made a huge difference in the final tabulation. I'm going to forego the guessing game for now just because I actually have a pretty big backlog of future game suggestions at this point, however if people want to guess for the fun of it, there was one tie in the game, and I will say it feels like a pretty random duo of albums.

Anyway, on to the results:

1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
11:
12:
13: Heritage

Total score: 24

Highest score: 6 (@JudasMyGuide)
Lowest score: 1 (@Shmoolikipod, @Detective Beauregard, @Night Prowler, @MrKnickerbocker)

I think it's safe to say 13 years later that Heritage is still easily Opeth's most controversial album. Despite it representing a shift in style that would endure throughout the decade, it still feels the most removed from the band's signature sound. Generally this forum skews more to the band's metal side, but on another forum or with more participation I could see Heritage having results more all over the place. I remember seeing a lot of takes thinking Heritage was a masterpiece and the best thing they ever did along with the takes that it was actually the worst thing the band ever did. Obviously, this forum skews more toward the former.

I will defend Heritage a little bit just to the degree that I don't think it's the worst thing Opeth has done. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas on this album and I appreciate the way the album leans on more atmospheric and improvisational moments. I like that they went all in on the concept of making a classic progressive rock album. As a one off it's an interesting experiment. The problem is that they used it as a basis for their music going forward. Sorceress and ICV, to me, are much weaker efforts just because they feel like uninspired retreads of Heritage and with less interesting material to boot. Where Heritage feels comfortable in its element, some of the later material feels a lot more forced and more like a Metal band desperately trying not to be a metal band. I don't really hear those issues on Heritage.

With that being said, I am not going to pretend that Heritage contains anything particularly mindblowing and the album meanders quite a bit on several songs. As a tribute to 70s prog rock, it lacks a lot of the excitement and instrumental virtuosity found on those classic albums. It also misses memorable songs. I think it makes for a pleasant listening experience, but I would be lying if I said that I went back to any of those songs regularly. Devil's Orchard still rocks hard though.


P.S.:
Diesel 11 said:
I was hoping to do a run-through before now but it just never materialized. Haven't heard every Opeth record so unless you decide to postpone another month I'll have to sit this one out, curious how it'll shake up though.
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Sth2112 said:
I love these games , but I have not listened to Opeth for about ten years, and I’m not familiar with the stuff before Blackwater park (I have given them a try, but that was a long time ago), so I’m not participating this time
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MindRuler said:
Not participating this time either ´cos I only heard 2 or 3 complete Opeth albums.
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Quoting the above because I wanted to mention something different I would like to do for this game.
If you did not submit a list, feel free to follow along with the discography discussion and submit a ranking at the end of the game! Since this was a lower turnout game, I want to see how the results would differ with a different set of lists. Some wild results came in for this one!
 
I didn't know the band until very recently. How stupid I was to ignore them. I haven't listened to their whole discography yet, but their early albums are just fantastic. Orchid must be one the greatest debut of a Metal band, and I can't get tired of the opening song.
 
Heritage is easily Opeth's weakest album and my least favorite Opeth album.

Opeth is a band with many transition albums, i.e. collections of songs where you can hear Mikael's songwriting pushing and pulling into a new territory while being unable to fully leave the past behind. Although I consider Watershed the true transition album of this era, I think Heritage still deserves the distinction.

From a songwriting perspective it is so unbelievably unfocused, so meandering, and lacks any real kind of identity. This is not a declarative, strong change in songwriting like....IDK say Metallica's Black Album (or Load/ReLoad...or St. Anger) or any one of Judas Priest's explorative/"sell out" records. This is someone throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

The only thing that is fully formed here is the audio production. Mikael knew exactly what he wanted this album to sound like and for better or worse (definitely worse) he achieved it. Heritage is pure style over substance and it bugs the crap out of me. The 70s warm, fuzzy, bass-forward, non-biting prog rock tone just feels wrong for this band at this stage in their career. More importantly, I feel like the production greatly overshadowed the songwriting. Mikael didn't really know what to write, but he sure knew what he wanted it to sound like (which doesn't mean a thing if the songs aren't good...and they aren't).

I truly don't care about the lack of growls. I care about the lack of dynamics here. Gone is the "soft/heavy" dynamic, gone is the "dark/light" dynamic, gone are the production techniques that IMO made Opeth, Opeth. The only dynamic here is "quiet/loud", and it drives me insane. I applaud Mikael's desire to fight against the standard brickwalled, overly compressed style of modern metal production, but when a section becomes so quiet that I have to literally turn up my volume (only to be deafened when it becomes loud again) you're doing it wrong.

Anyway.

The Devil's Orchard is a good song. Folklore is a good song. Everything else mostly sucks with some songs being my least favorite in their entire discography.
 
And all is right with the world. Heritage has "a vibe" and that's it. Not much more than a random assortment of ideas, some of them are more pleasant to the ear, the others less, but they all feel like they're only friends with each other because they fit some atmospheric frame. It's aimless and has no emotional pull here or there. I probably prefer the intro to half of the songs.
 
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
11:
12: Sorceress
13: Heritage

Total score: 26

Highest score: 7 (@Shmoolikipod)
Lowest score: 1 (@The Dissident @Mosh)

The contest for last place was quite close, as Sorceress just squeaked out a win by two points. In the end, it seems like having a higher outlier score and only a couple last placed rankings made all the difference for this album. Otherwise, almost every other list had it as #11 or #12 (the one other exception being a #10 placement). This is actually a bit of a difference from Heritage which had more variance, but also a strong contingency of lists that placed it last.

To me, this album and Heritage have a lot in common. I guess I can see how this song has a few more identifiable "songs" and is a little less meandering overall, but the flipside of that is what leads me to placing Heritage a bit higher. I feel like the songs on this album just aren't very good. They sound like very generic dad rock prog worship without a lot of the dynamics or moods that I expect from Opeth. Heritage at least has a vibe to it. Will o the Wisp is pretty, but far from their best ballad. Similarly, the opening title track is kinda all over the place. Once the album gets into the back half, it's kinda back to meandering Heritage like material but with even less personality.

The ultimate sin of Sorceress is that they clearly wanted this to be more of a metal album. I mean listen to the riffing on Chrysalis, the low drop A chugs on Sorceress. Imagine these songs with a Metal production and maybe even some growls. Instead we get this watered down muddy sounding slog. In some ways it just feels like Mikael is trolling the audience and is more interested in sticking to his guns on the stylistic change than he is following the musical ideas to their natural conclusion. The other three Newpeth albums make sense for what they are, but Sorceress just feels so forced.

That's not to say it's all bad, as Opeth are still great performers and Mikael is a pretty good songwriter even at his lowest moments. There's nothing disastrous about this album. I quite like The Wilde Flowers and Era is a fantastic closer. On the bonus disc, Spring is a really enjoyable track that is inexplicably left off the main album. There are other parts that show potential but just don't really get there. Strange Brew is a major example for me, lots of really interesting parts in a vacuum but the sum of the parts is kind of a big meh.
 
Mosh said:
If you did not submit a list, feel free to follow along with the discography discussion and submit a ranking at the end of the game! Since this was a lower turnout game, I want to see how the results would differ with a different set of lists. Some wild results came in for this one!
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Gonna try to do this. Spun Heritage today and I definitely understand why it came last (although I don't have the context of the other Newpeth albums yet). Definitely meanders a lot. Some tasty bits here and there, especially when the lead guitar takes center stage, but a ton of it is just liminal doodling and most of the songs don't feel like they have a good throughline from beginning to end. Often they feel like they could've been cool interludes within those larger classic Opeth tracks, but don't stand up well on their own. I also get the impression that the guitar is a little stifled - I like prog rock as much as the next guy but this definitely sounds like a metal band trying to be prog rock.

"Devil's Orchard" has some strong moments although the "God is dead" refrain is way too campy for my tastes. The riff to "Slither" reminds me of "Back in the Village" but it's otherwise an uninteresting rocker. "The Lines in My Hand" really builds to a cool place by end, possibly the best moment on the album. "Häxprocess" has some pretty cool Mikael singing. Beyond this most of the songs I could say the same thing for: some cool elements, but they do not come together as full songs. The album's intro was pointless and "Marrow of the Earth" didn't do all that much for me either.

Don't see myself coming back to this very often. Gut instinct say it's a C-, would rather listen to Yes instead.
 
Let me say that Opeth has no straight-up bad albums. Are the Nupeth ones weaker than the classics? Almost exclusively, yes. But none of them suck. None of them are St. Anger.

I ranked Heritage as the weakest of Opeth’s “observations,” but after re-listening to it, there’s not one moment that I overly dislike. As others have stated, it’s a hodgepodge of random ideas – some of which work, and some of which fall flat. But at no point during listening did I want to turn the album off. It has a mood, and maybe it’s just me, but it’s a creepy record. Almost every song has some eerie presence to it, some with portions that would not sound out of place in a horror film. Perfect for Halloween.

Make no mistake about it – Heritage is indeed a record. By that, I mean that Mikael obviously envisioned this to be played on vinyl while wearing a cardigan and relaxing in a recliner, drinking whatever it is hipsters like to drink (I’d say PBR, but that’s obviously not classy enough for this experience). The mix is simply awful; it’s far too warm and fuzzy, with the bass guitar (as much as I love Mendez) too high in the mix. Clearly this is a sign of Akerfeldt’s vintage ‘70s prog obsession, which we all know just needs to go away. This mix is an issue with all of Nupeth’s albums; they simply lack any sort of bite in the guitar tone.

Anyway, outside of the pretty – but ultimately fluff – instrumental pieces, the album is bookended by the strongest tracks. The Devil’s Orchard is easily a top five Nupeth song (I do not consider Nupeth and Oldpeth to be the same band, you see). Outside of lacking growls, it’s practically flawless. Folklore is another strong one, with my only complains being the weak chorus and the disjointedness between the two halves (the second half is arguably the apex of the album).

The rest? It’s fine. I admittedly liked a lot of the groovier, more atmospheric sections on my latest listen, including the opening of I Feel the Dark, a lot of Haxprocess, and some parts of Famine. I’ve always been a sucker for the surprise dynamics of Nepenthe, and in general I appreciate Nupeth’s jazz efforts (at a limit of one or less per album). The Lines in My Hand may be the third strongest track here, blending folksiness with a feel that worked extremely well on the gusty fall afternoon that I “observed” it. I do think parts of it are too whimsical, though, and it’s hard to believe that this is the same band that once wrote Blackwater Park.

Where I feel the album slumps is where things get too chromatic and atonal. Examples include much of the second half of I Feel the Dark, some stuff in Famine, the weak chorus of Folklore, and maybe some stuff in Haxprocess? I also don't like Slither at all. I know it's a tribute to Dio, which is great, but nothing about it feels like Opeth. It just doesn't do anything for me.

I must also mention that I find the two bonus tracks – Pyre and Face in the Snow – to be stronger than most of the album proper. Maybe it’s because they take one idea and run with it, having more of a Damnation feel than the rest of Heritage? I don’t know, but I like them. The latter in particular has an oppressive and lonely feel that hits me every time.
 
Sorceress is just such a (poorly) mixed bag. I also ranked it second-to-last and most of that is down to the ludicrous amount of interlude/unfinished tracks, the psychedelic leanings, and just pure lame songwriting. Not to mention, the mix is atrocious.

I don't hate Sorceress the way I hate Heritage. I actually think the run of songs from the title track through Chrysalis is pretty great. But the second half of the album completely loses me. Even a song like Era, which should be cool, feels forced and half-baked.

I think it's the only record in the discography where I feel like Mikael was forcing the songwriting and half the time just stopped caring. Even Heritage (though I dislike it) feels more genuine, sort of like the St. Anger debacle.

That's all I have to say about Sorceress, as generally it doesn't hold my attention much at all.
 
Diesel 11 said:
Some tasty bits here and there, especially when the lead guitar takes center stage, but a ton of it is just liminal doodling and most of the songs don't feel like they have a good throughline from beginning to end.
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This was the second album with Fredrik on lead guitar, and he is an absolute beast of a player. Shame he joined at their weakest moment, though.
Diesel 11 said:
"The Lines in My Hand" really builds to a cool place by end, possibly the best moment on the album.
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I'd say Lines is one of the other decent tunes, for sure.

Detective Beauregard said:
This mix is an issue with all of Nupeth’s albums; they simply lack any sort of bite in the guitar tone.
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My single biggest complaint of Nupeth.
Detective Beauregard said:
Where I feel the album slumps is where things get too chromatic and atonal. Examples include much of the second half of I Feel the Dark, some stuff in Famine, the weak chorus of Folklore, and maybe some stuff in Haxprocess?
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This is my second biggest complaint about Nupeth. It's like Mikael exchanged brutal riffing and tone for just atonal jazz noodling. It's all over the two new singles, too, so I'm not super pumped about it.
Detective Beauregard said:
I must also mention that I find the two bonus tracks – Pyre and Face in the Snow – to be stronger than most of the album proper. Maybe it’s because they take one idea and run with it, having more of a Damnation feel than the rest of Heritage? I don’t know, but I like them. The latter in particular has an oppressive and lonely feel that hits me every time.
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Absolutely! It's mind-boggling how he included some truly terrible songs but left these off the record. They're actually songs!
 
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