Opeth - Heritage

Polarizing. That’s the first word that comes to mind when I think back on my initial spinning of the new Opeth magnus opus, Heritage. Sure, the die-hards will love it because it’s Opeth, and Mike Akerfeldt could fart and they would feel that it was as if the angels of Heaven were singing enlightenment. Those other Opeth fans who expect every album to sound like the same guttural belches from the album before will loathe the very existence of it. Of course, they also loathed everything after My Arms, Your Hearse because of the clean vocal thing that started creeping its way into the gloom, and probably jumped ship a long time ago. Anyway . . .

Being the Opeth fan, the music fan, that I am, I naturally had to bust out and pick up the deluxe collectors box set of Heritage because . . . if a band is going to put that much effort into the packaging, the least I could do is pick up a copy and bask in the physical splendor of the whole thing. Y’know, embrace the nostalgic youth within and lie back on my floor, paging through the booklet that captures the band laboring away in the studio, letting my eyes dance across the lyrics, reading the liner notes to every song, immersing myself so deep into this thing that I can practically smell the dust and must and the electric tension of the studio as if I were actually there. All the while, the music is fluttering away in the background and becoming the soundtrack for this day and many more after.

When Racer asked me about the album, my first description of it was this: A mixture of Camel and Rainbow, as if being played by Miles Davis. Heritage is a prog-nauts wet dream, and the rock aspects, though farther and fewer between than past outings, still rock harder than most. But the element that caught most by surprise was the jazzy elements of it. Full on fusion-y jazz passages weaving their way through the razor sharp rock guitars and airy progressive movements, and that’s where I’ll say that this album is brilliant. By constantly evolving the sound to something that becomes completely unexpected, Opeth make themselves relevant for today, tomorrow, and well into the future, constantly redefining themselves to satisfy their muse, not the public perception.

Normally, at this point, I would break down my favorite songs from the album, point out the highlights, explain how they moved me, etc. But, in the case of Heritage, I could do that for about five thousand words and there’s really no point. In truth, there are times when it’s flat out difficult to tell if a new song is playing if you’re not watching the LP spinning along (and even that can be difficult because of the ebb and flow of the grooves). So, know this . . . every song has rocking elements with the exception of the title track and the album closer, “Marrow of the Earth”. Both songs are beautiful instrumentals that have great neo-classical and folks elements to them.

The rest of the album is made up of eight tracks (CD and normal LP version) that never exceed nine minutes, with most hovering around the five – six minute mark. And that may be the most fascinating aspect about the songwriting on this one. Heritage is made up of shorter songs, but possibly more complex songs than Opeth’s typical ten to thirteen minute epics. The mellow portions range from the psychedelic to ambient jazz to acoustic folk, the rockin’ portions are heavy in a 70’s metal kind of way . . . distorted guitars with a lot of fuzz, not that razor sharp crunch that we’ve grown accustomed to with the band past outings. The synthesizers throughout the album add a ton of weight that may have disappeared with the lack of guitar crunch, and I mean, these things are Jon Lord heavy. At times, it’s as if Mikael Akerfeldt went to his Deep Purple and Rainbow collections and channeled some of that energy into his writing of Heritage, particularly on the song “Slither”, which was lovingly dedicated to the late, great Ronnie James Dio.

I will say this, of the ten songs on the album, “Haxprocess” and “Folklore” are my personal favorites. They are grand and epic journeys that leave me intoxicated by the instrumental phrasing and the musical flourishes. They’re complex and grandiose tracks, but there’s a more organic, more primal element to these songs (as well as the aforementioned “Slither”) than appeals to me the most. I would have to say it’s the combination of the intricate and the primal passages that make these songs the most intriguing. Epic.

Then, of course, there’s also the two unreleased tracks that came with the collector’s edition box set. “Pyre” and “Face in the Snow” are outstanding, 70’s inspired rock tracks that are much more straight forward than the rest of the material on Heritage, but too good to not be included. I like the way they included them as a part of the package, but not necessarily as part of the album. Solid stuff.

Is this my favorite Opeth album? Far from it. Is it their most ambitious album? At this point, yes. Heritage is to Opeth as Bitches Brew was to Miles Davis. Ground breaking. Avant garde. Unorthodox. Genre bending. Redefining. And like Bitches Brew, it’s damn good. Excellent. Mind bogglingly amazing. Can I listen to it at any given point in the day? Unlikely. The concentration level would be too great. The music is far too complex to simply have in the background because it would beg for attention with every measure or tempo change. And if you were to try and concentrate on it throughout the day, you’d never get anything else done. Do I love it? In short, yes. The songwriting is amazing and the performances are exotic, captivating escapades in sonic exploration.  And, most of all, I can appreciate the artistic endeavor of an album like this. Musician will love it, music connoisseurs will love it, audiophiles will love . . . death metallers and your average rock fans will not. It’s not a metal record. It’s a rock record with a heavy dose of progressive, folk, classical, and jazz elements to it. It’s a mixture of Camel and Rainbow, as if played by Miles Davis. I stand by my initial assessment.

As part of the deluxe package, there’s a DVD documentary on the making of the album. When I’m done here . . . you’ll probably be able to find me in the Ripple Theater.

--Pope

www.opeth.com 

Opeth - In Live Concert at The Royal Albert Hall

No matter how hard I try, how many fancy words I string together, to try and describe Opeth’s In Live Concert at The Royal Albert Hall, I fear I simply won’t do this package it’s due justice. To aptly describe this majestic release, I would have to channel the essence of James Michener, who’s thousand page epics have a tendency to sprawl across hundreds, nay . . . thousands of years of a subjects existence, depicting the great land movements, the tectonic shifts and violent volcanic episodes that formed the environment that the subject may call home. I would then have to detail out every last bit of emotion and nuance from the main character(s), so rich in detail that you would feel that you’ve just spent the last century walking in their shoes. Then, I’d weave such an intricate tapestry of words that you would swear that you could taste the dust of a country road on your tongue, feel the bitter cold of a Chesapeake winter, or smell the floral scents of perfume on a maidens breast . . . or, in the case of Opeth, the stinging taste of battery acid on your tongue, the sweltering heat of an enclosed venue, or the ripening smell of the bodies struggling within said venue.

I can use all of those nifty adjectives that we writers like to use so much. Awesome. Amazing. Fantastic. Astonishing. Yeah, they all work because they do express some amount of excitement about that which they are describing. But in the case of In Live Concert at The Royal Albert Hall, they’re simply not adequate enough descriptors. A four disc vinyl set with two DVD’s will never adequately be described by one word, especially a set as painstakingly detailed as this particular issue. This set deserves . . . no, requires a tome of words to form a shadow of what is actually going on. The set will require another volume to add color.

For Opeth’s twentieth anniversary, Mikael Akerfeldt and company decided to do a short tour, hitting a few venues that harbor an image of class and respect, and then release the subsequent recordings in a package that would be represent the band and cater to the record collecting masses (of those of us who are still out here.) The two album set is all recorded live and spans the full career of Opeth, paying homage to many of the members of the band who have since moved on, and spotlighting with special attention their breakout album, Blackwater Park, by performing it in its entirety. The packaging on this set draws me back to those glorious days of the 1970’s, an era when rock n’ roll, progressive music, whatever, paid close attention to the visual marketing of the album art, the imagery, the overall sensation of buying a record and vegging for hours with the music as the soundtrack to the visual stimuli that the artist had created . . . a phenomenon that was inhibited by the CD revolution and completely lost in the digital age. This particular box set includes a concert poster and a twenty page book with “Awesome. Amazing. Fantastic. Astonishing” photos from the concert at The Royal Albert Hall . . . all serious eye candy to lose oneself while the vinyl does its glorious dance on the turntable.

However, the imagery really means nothing if the musical quality isn’t there. Let’s face it. We all have those great pieces of vinyl where the album art is infinitely superior than the musical quality . . . Meatloaf, I’m looking at you. In the case of In Live Concert at The Royal Albert Hall, the musical quality is sharp, loud, and clearer than just about any live recording I’ve heard, and the performances are a testament to the physical and mental abilities of these five musicians. I’ve said it before, with the advent of Pro Tools and all of the various technical studio tricks, recording ten minute epics that shift moods, musical styles, tempos, and time signatures is cool, but it’s almost too easy. Maybe I’ve become jaded. But to pull off that feat live, without a net, as they say . . . that, my friends, is what being a musician is all about! To put this latest live adventure into perspective, imagine that Opeth is playing all of Blackwater Park, which they do, without fucking up the parts and transitions (coz’ you should know that there are plenty of those lying around) and then follow it up with an additional eight songs that touch on every variation of the bands creativity, every stylistic change, every musical nuance from the last twenty years. Breath taking.

I could go through every song and wax poetic about their deeper meaning to my every heartbeat, but that got old the second I thought about it. Instead, you really need to listen for yourselves. In particular, “Bleak,” “Blackwater Park,” “Advent,” “The Moor,” “Harlequin Forest,” and set closer “The Lotus Eater” jump to mind as the moments that I felt the greatest shiver of someone walking on my grave, of staring into the mesmerizing gaze of a thousand succubi, or breathing in the noxious and intoxicating fumes of Hades. I can’t help but marvel at the performances of these musicians, the rich textures that they apply with their respective instruments, and the overall exhilarating physical sensation that I get when I hear the sounds and tones spew from my speakers and bathe me in their brilliance.

After basking in the sonic splendor of the aforementioned four discs, I made my way to the Ripple Theater and dropped in the DVD’s. “Awesome. Amazing. Fantastic. Astonishing.” I honestly don’t think I breathed for something like four hours. Mouth agape, I stared . . . completely transfixed on the visual performance of this concert. The band must have used something like 3,000 cameras (a slight exaggeration) for this production. We had the standard center stage angle, left stage angle, right stage angle . . . got a little creative with the behind the band, over-the-shoulder angle, some nice crowd angles and then a few nice shots of the drummers foot (always a fan of the drummers foot work) . . . and then there were the camera angles where I swear I could count the musicians’ nose hair. The visuals were cool, nothing interstellar like a band mascot running out on stage and catching fire (as cool as that always is), just clean and concise images that help separate Opeth from any other band on the face of the planet. I found the stage presence of the various band members intriguing. Martin Mendez with his hair whipping from side to side, Fredrik Akesson dropping into the classic metal headbanging pose, the relaxed, almost bored look of drummer Martin Axenrot, and maniacal glare and eccentric demeanor of keyboardist Per Wiberg . . . and, of course, the stalwart center figure of Mikael Akerfeldt . . . they all just had that look!  

When watching this, note the guitar issues that the band has during particular songs. With a simple wave of his hand, Mikael Akerfeldt signaled to his guitar tech, and without panic, without stepping away from the mic, continues belting out his trademark death growl with the same sincerity as we’ve grown to become accustomed . . . guitar tech switches out guitars in mid vocal line and BAM! He disappears and the show goes on. I give a nod of respect to the professionalism that Akerfeldt shows here because I’ve seen the opposite from bands in the past, people become flustered, they freeze or start throwing tantrums, ultimately making the show suffer. Not here, not with Opeth. The best part though is in the second set closer, “The Lotus Eater,” as guitarist Fredrik Akesson has his own set of technical issues with his gear. In listening to the LP version, it simply sounds like the band has an extended quiet passage going on in the song, kind of like they’re playing with the crowd a bit . . . as if this was a planned break. Seeing what actually happened fills in the gaps from the pure audio portion, but I think it’s interesting how the mind goes places based on the information it’s given.

Yeah, I spent more money than I could really afford on this production, but food is overrated anyway. Hey! It’s not like anyone’s ever really starved to death, right? In truth, based on how much I want to listen to this album, and spend four-plus hours glued to my television watching this performance, how excited I get when I start talking about this album to people, how many words I just wrote as tribute on this release, hell . . . I’d spend the money all over again. If you’re an Opeth fan and you’re on the fence about this album for any reason, then I would hope that these words have acted a gentle nudge to knock you off the fence. If you’re new to Opeth and are looking for a jumping off point to get into this band, this is the place to do it. You get Blackwater Park in its entirety and select choices from every album before and since, with performances that capture the band at the height of its creative brilliance. If you don’t like Opeth and have no interest in the band whatsoever, I thank you for reading this far though I’m confused why you would have spent your time doing so.  -  Pope    

FYI – this release does come in numerous formats, so don’t feel that because I wrote about the vinyl edition that you have no other choices. Rock on! 

--Pope

buy here: Opeth - In Live Concert At The Royal Albert Hall (2DVD/3CD)
buy here: DVD Opeth - In Live Concert At The Royal Albert Hall (2DVD)
buy here: mp3: In Live Concert At The Royal Albert Hall

www.opeth.com