Review Summary: Having a dream doesn’t necessarily mean you can execute it.
All of the praise surrounding Opeth’s stark transformation has left me confounded. Here we have one of the greatest metal behemoths in the world taking a look at their vast empire and deciding that they no longer want any part of it. First came the announcement from Akerfeldt that the album would be the band’s second to completely forego the growling vocals, then came the release of ‘The Devil’s Orchard’, a rather aimless ditty weighed down by its own pretentious posturing. The entire album follows in the same vein, exuding a wealth of unnecessary interludes, chord changes, and aimless keyboard-heavy instrumentation. Never does it feel purposeful in the way that
Blackwater Park’s ‘Bleak’ or
Watershed’s ‘The Lotus Eater’ did; in fact, enduring
Heritage is analogous to listening to the misguided ramblings of a madman. The record’s ADD can be felt with every unbridged leap between ideas to its shocking lack of transitions, and the whole time there is this pervading sense that
Heritage doesn’t really have anything to say at all.
That suspicion is proven more and more to be true as the album progresses, mercilessly dragging the listener through one overwrought song after another. The bored laments of “God is dead” on the aforementioned ‘The Devil’s Orchard’ could have been (and have been) expressed with more earnestness by several other artists, and the instrumental backdrop is nothing to get excited about by Opeth’s standards. ‘I Feel The Dark’ harkens back to
Damnation’s ‘Windowpane’, but it is lacking that one impressive moment by which most songs are conceived (and thus giving them a purpose to exist). The individual song here is much like the whole: unmemorable, inconsistent meandering that strings together unrelated concepts seemingly at random. ‘Slither’ feels like
Heritage’s most manufactured offering, following a moderately complex but mind-numbingly repetitive electric chord that does nothing to augment the album’s artistic worth. ‘Nepenthe’ and ‘Haxprocess’ are equally harmless, and it is by this point that all hope is lost of
Heritage living up to its lofty, 70’s prog-oriented goals. As the seventh track of out ten, ‘Famine’ is perhaps the first and only truly worthwhile offering. Despite containing the most pointless interlude on the album, it eventually builds to an impressive drumming display and an ominous, crushing riff that could have been
Heritage’s cornerstone if only it had something else to work with.
One might speculate that the reason ‘Famine’ stands out is because of its lively drumming, and given the lack of variation that plagues
Heritage’s percussion, that is a perfectly reasonable assumption. It may be that Opeth gave their keyboardist too many liberties in lieu of percussive innovation, but a careful listen will reveal similar drumming patterns on nearly every single song. ‘I Feel The Dark’ and ‘Slither’ are the worst offenders, but the shortcoming consistently surfaces on other tracks as well. Despite the record’s overwhelming sense of novelty, it is Opeth’s inability to back up their creativity with such basic song sense that plagues
Heritage. Its intentions are admirable, but it lacks the concrete ideas needed to properly structure a song…and then on top of that, the album fails to tie together these loose cannon ideas with even an ounce of cohesion, resulting in a chaotic mess that can only be considered innovative by those who scrutinize to see it in that exact light. It all leads to a feeble sounding attempt from what most people consider to be one of the greatest heavy metal bands in the world.
