Disclaimer: Knowing how to review this record has been very difficult for me because I’m a big fan of the band and I have no desire to try make my opinion seem bigger than the band’s work. I understand my subjective position as a reviewer very well. But this record suffers from pretty major issues that it make it very difficult for me to enjoy and that show off the weakness of the band in its current incarnation. I am aware that there will be a good amount of whining and gnashing of teeth over this review, and you’re welcome to it. Just remember that I 1) am not invested in Opeth playing death metal; 2) like plenty of bands that have changed their sounds; and 3) enjoy progressive and abstract music of all stripes very much.

It’s hard to believe that we’re actually looking at Opeth‘s 10th full length studio record now in 2011. It’s amazing how the little progressive death metal band that could is a global powerhouse of extreme and progressive music that is signed to one of the biggest labels in the metal world. Heritage was billed as a bit of a ‘look backwards,’ in a sense, with main man Åkerfeldt saying that he thought extreme metal was boring and that he has thought that for a while and so this was going to be something else. As a long time fan (who has regularly been called a fanboy), I think it’s obvious to me that Opeth was outgrowing their roots. While I think that Ghost Reveries is a genius album, Watershed was definitely not. It felt uninspired and rushed. So the big question for me coming into all of this was: would having more time and freedom make Heritage feel fresh? Would it be a record that would change Opeth for good—and also for the better?

Heritage is very much as Åkerfeldt said in a recent interview, it is a progressive rock album that sounds very much like its biggest influence actually is mainly Opeth. Over time, Åkerfeldt has crafted a sound that is unique to the band and that has moved them into the limelight. There is a cadence and melodic structure to Opeth riffs that just feels very Opeth. The linear fashion of writing songs is also something that, nowadays is commonplace, but that has long been associated with Mikael’s writing style. Songs that are often more like movements than traditionally structured tracks works well in death metal, which is so heavily riff-based. This made for epic soundscapes that were at once exciting and interesting, but also had the ability to be fragile and beautiful. It was a sound that worked for the band and launched them into the stratosphere popularitywise.

But while Heritage retains Opeth‘s voice (metaphysically and physically, of course), it does not retain its genius and I think this has to do with the fact that the songwriting on Heritage feels almost lazy, but certainly underdeveloped. A better way to say this might be that Heritage is full of great riffs and ideas, but not many very good songs. Instead, the listener is left feeling like the writing process was just to take a bunch of ideas and to hamfistedly shove them into these somewhat linear songs, often times with little regard as to key, time signature or context and feel. While this could seem “progressive,” for me it doesn’t feel so progressive as disjointed. A case in point is the single “The Devil’s Orchard” where, instead of writing a transition on guitar, keyboards are used to transfer out of a very cool verse/chorus iteration in a pretty jarring, unrelated fashion before trying to segue back to the main “chorus” theme at the end randomly.

This kind of patchwork writing with bad or jarring transitions is basically the mark of Heritage. The same thing happens in “I Feel the Dark,” “Nepenthe,” “Famine,” and “The Lines in My Hand.” It even happens in my favorite songs on the record, which would definitely be “Slither” and “Folklore.” The only tracks that don’t suffer from this are “Heritage,” which is a piano track and the outro “Marrow of the Earth” which features Wishbone Ash or Iron Maiden-style guitar harmonies, which is similar to “Ending Credits” from Damnation or “Epilogue” from My Arms, Your Hearse.

In spite of all of this, there are some really great moments in these songs, too. I love the first 2 minutes and 50 seconds of “Slither,” and it’s very cool riff and “Beneath the Mire” kind of drive, before it devolves into a non-related acoustic guitar part that wasn’t developed. “Famine” works with its very Jethro Tull feel, before devolving into a jam at the end that I’m not a huge fan of. ” Without the first 2 minutes of “Häxprocess” the song would have been genius, but it just sort of meanders in and then despite that the rest is really good, it feels a bit dead on arrival. “Folklore” is probably the most consistent track on the album, in my opinion, and it’s got a great Kebnekajse or Jan Johansson kind of feel to it that really hits the spot. And the band itself is playing as well or better than it ever has. Martin Axenrot is finally achieving Lopez-style jazz feel, while Mendez performs excellently on the bass. Fredrik has a number of great solos and, of course, Per’s keyboard work is the glue that holds the record together.

But beyond the obvious talent of the band, what do they leave the listener with? The record has grown on me to a certain extent since I first got it. There is arguably a “unifying feel” of the album, even if the writing is disparate and disjointed. But the whole is, unfortunately, not greater than its parts. Instead, I’d say there’s about 40 minutes of pretty good to excellent music, but a lot of bad transitions and only a couple great songs. This leaves me, frankly, aghast, as the fantastic transitions and compositions are the thing that really elevated Opeth to the level of great in my mind. If you think about the transition in “A Fair Judgement” at about 4:15 in the track or the transfer from “Pull me down again…” into the new part at 4:01 in “The Drapery Falls”. How about the end of “When”? And I could increase this list 10-fold.

So to say that Heritage is a disappointing record is almost an understatement. While I found some of things really growing on me since I started listening to it, which places it above Watershed in the pantheon, it is not a record that I think really belongs in the same breath as the band’s earlier stuff—or in the same breath as bands like Camel, Rush, Yes, King Crimson or Jethro Tull. Whether it is that the keyboards transitioning unlinked ideas has become a crutch, or that the tendency of death metal riffs to be based around an open E hid a lack of sophistication in Åkerfeldt’s writing style, Heritage exposes these problems in a way that even Watershed didn’t. And that leaves this Angry Opeth Fanboy feeling very disappointed.

Related posts:

1. Things You Might Have Missed 2011: Graveworm – Fragments of Death
2. Opeth Bush Crash/Suicide
3. Leprous – Bilateral Review

Progressive music is a vast category filled with all sorts of various constellations of bands from Dream Theater to Symphony X to Rush to Opeth to Death to Pink Floyd to Pain of Salvation to Coheed & Cambria (arguably) and so forth. It can be very difficult to keep all that shit in order and, frankly, to find good progressive bands because it’s such a huge category. Despite the fact that progressive music should be the biggest, best and most original music in the world it suffers from some serious problems. The first is a tendency towards living in the past (för svenskar: bakåtsträvande) and the second is unoriginality, oddly enough. So finding a progressive band that is excellent, modern and original is still a hard thing to do. But you’ll never guess who has some angry (but good) news!

Leprous hails from Norway (and seconds as Ihsahn‘s live backup band, apparently), and they have made a fantastic impression upon fans of progressive music everywhere. Their first record Tall Poppy Syndrome hit in 2009 and they have made their mark both with that record and their live show around the world. Now they’re back in 2011, signed to InsideOut and putting out the record Bilateral which is one of the coolest and most original records I’ve heard this year. Coming in at 58 minutes long, Bilateral is a journey through sometimes groove-tinged basslines, nerdy polyrhythm, diverse songwriting, poppy choruses and melodies and a smooth but varied vocal approach from singer/keyboardist Einar Solberg.

Leprous really sounds like a mix of the best progressive metal bands around today. The vocals are reminiscent of Riverside‘s fantastic singer, though Einar isn’t nearly as modern rock. But while he pulls off the melancholy in tracks like “Forced Entry,” he also has a very cool flare for the almost oriental sounding melodies that come through in the aforementioned track as well as most memorably in the track “Thorn”. There are moments where the songwriting and style reminds me a lot of more recent Pain of Salvation, as well, blending in what feels like classic rock elements techy time signatures (like on “Painful Detours”), but never wandering into the kind of djent territory of never developing a melody while playing a polyrhythm. One can even hear an Opeth kind of vibe on some tracks where the lead guitar floats above the other parts with simple melodies that stick in your head. Finally, there’s a bit of a funk vibe that actually reminds me of Faith No More with a bass heavy kind of approach that works spectacularly well.

But of course if you blend all of this together it doesn’t sound like any one of those bands really, instead it is a blending of excellently written, addictive tracks that ooze charisma and technical prowess. Leprous jumps through the Burning Hoop o’ Progressive Doom in that they are able to blend both the technical and interesting with smart melodic writing. Even though the record is an hour long, the listener doesn’t really want to hop off until the end. Though, personally, I find that an hour long record tends to be sort of inconvenient from a lifestyle point of view and I found that I really didn’t listen to the last two tracks as many times as the ealier tracks. This is not because they’re bad tracks (they’re really great tracks), but the whole thing is a bit much to chomp down in a single go. I’d like to know how this record would sound if they’d had to edit it down to 45 minutes.

Still, there’s very little negative that I can say about this album. The choices are great, the melodies are fantastic and the writing is as intelligent as the best among the progressive scene since the 1990s. Leprous is a band with a bright future if they can keep up this kind of output. So buy this album (despite the bad art) and see them live (and buy a shirt). This is definitely August’s Record o’ the Month.

Related posts:

1. Angry Metal Guy’s Top 10(ish) of 2011
2. Above Symmetry – Ripples Review
3. Three – Revisions Review

Another record from Metal Blade’s Canadian installation and the third record from Canadian 70s-metal-meets-hardcore band Bison BC. This record took me totally by surprise, as I’d never heard of this band before and wasn’t really sure of what to expect. Honestly, all I had to go with was the look of the record and it looked very 70s. That fact alone hasn’t been very reassuring, while there are some bands out there trying to push the sound a bit, it just feels like another nostalgia movement that isn’t going anywhere to me so I tend to be pretty skeptical of such records.

Dark Ages, however, is maybe that white buffalo of the herd, then. While maintaining the fundamental foundations that you hear from bands like High on Fire or Barn Burner, that is, the thick low end and doomy feel, Bison BC pushes the envelope with a much more hardcore oriented vocal approach. The sound is also characterized by some old school sounding death metal riffs and some deceivingly proggy moments which I could have done with even more of actually. While the indie scene is getting their 70s prog on, the metal scene seems to be more interested in emulating the simplicity of Motorhead and Black Sabbath and less with some of the more progressive roots of the scene—something that is slightly remedied here.

I might be wrong, but there is definitely the feel that these guys were also a bunch of former crust punks or something. The record is produced much more like an old hardcore or metal album than most of the modern stuff that’s coming out and it’s a sound that I really like. The tones are thick and meaty, the drums are nothing but beef and the guitar tone is like smooth like butter while still being totally fat. This is one of the best features of the album, as you sort of zone in and out of their riffs, it really stands out how fucking heavy old school production really  sounds when you compare it to a lot of the modern production tricks and techniques that we’re hearing these days. All-in-all, the earthy tone from this Canadian foursome is a refreshing change of pace and Dark Ages has all the heavy riffs that a modern metal head could possibly want. For me, the highlights were definitely “Stressed Elephant”, which has a cool horn section at the beginning, some acoustic work at the end and is just generally totally epic, and the track “Die of Devotion” which is almost thrash, except that the chord and melodic choices are way more interesting. But “Wendigo Pt. 3″ which seals the record up is definitely the finest moment and it culminates in all that prog that’s missing from the more straight hardcore and metal stuff.

Honestly, the biggest complaint that I have about this record is probably that it’s not proggy enough. They sound like they want to prog it up, but then they always break it back down to the more simplistic hardcore and crusty stylings. While it definitely works and is definitely enjoyable, it left me frustrated waiting for Rush or Kansas to burst through all the “raaaah!” that was going on here. Fans of the neo-70s stuff, crusty punk and hardcore should definitely check this out. Though, I think most people should at least give these guys a listen, because Dark Ages is interesting, thick and heavy as the nearly extinct land mammal from which they take their name.

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1. The Dillinger Escape Plan – Option Paralysis Review
2. The Kandidate – Until We Are Outnumbered Review
3. Into the Moat – The Design

The name Kaipa might or might not strike a bell for you, depending on where you’re from and how old you are. The band technically been around for a very long time, as they were a part of the Swedish prog scene which in some ways really differentiated itself from what non-Swedes think of when they think of prog. While prog from England, the US or Canada was often times very much about technical expertise, drug induced trips of fancy or philosophically complex ideas and theses, Swedish prog was a very lefty, ideologically communist movement. It’s not something that this Angry Metal Guy has been particularly well-informed about, so instead we called Angry Swedish Prog Correspondent to inform us about this whole fascinating phenomenon. There’s a lot one can say about it, but let us formulate it like this: Swedish prog was dirty, lefty hippies giving even the most talentless member of their friends group the right to play, despite them not having any talent at all. Kaipa wasn’t like this, on the other hand. Instead, they were much more akin to Yes, Genesis, Rush and other progressive rock bands. As a consequence, they were never quite accepted as part of the Swedish scene, but became more internationally accepted. However, unlike the communal-living types like National Teatern, Kaipa reformed in the early 2000s and has been producing records since with just one original member, Hans Lundin.

Because of the fact that Lundin is the only original member, it means that he’s been able to fill in the band with new members making Kaipa a fantastic, talented group of musicians who are really producing music and playing on the plane that one really expects of excellent prog. This demonstrates itself in the varying styles and places Kaipa takes the listener on this long and winding journey. From the eternally happy sunshine land, for example, of the opening and title track on the record, “In the Wake of Evolution”, to the neo-folk “Folkia’s First Decision”. There are moments that are reminiscent of reggae, 50s Rock n’ Roll and, of course, jazz fusion. Of course, the fact that Per Nilsson (Scar Symmetry) is playing guitar on this record is evident through some very metal guitar solos, as well.

In the Wake of Evolution isn’t just musically varied—Lundin and company take us through an emotional roller coaster sonically and the effect is great. Every track on the album stands out as a dynamic, self-contained cosmos of fascinating ideas and emotional expression. Despite the fact that the songs range between two and half and 17 minutes long, there is definitely a sense of balance and unity between the separate tracks. However, there are a lot of pieces written in major keys and some very, very happy music on this record. This, of course, makes this Angry Metal Guy a little uncomfortable because it’s just so… HAPPY.  But particularly when you hit the later sections of the record that are a bit more orchestrated, the emotional downs stand out as well. I don’t think you can be an aging progger without having a little bit of pent up sadness and anger.

There are very few things to complain about on this album, actually. Sometimes the composition can feel a little forced, but the biggest problem for me personally are the vocals of Aleena Gibson, who has an incredibly sharp voice. Not like she’s not in tune, but instead she just has a very harsh sounding tone. While she has a unique sound and she blends well with Lundin and Lundström in the harmonies, on her own she can be a bit grating after a while. Instead let us end this here by saying that there are very few progressive bands who are composing music that really carries the same feeling of experimentality and curiosity about blending music into a cohesive whole that is at once intellectually stimulating, catchy and engaging. Kaipa embodies this feeling of progressiveness on their new album and I suggest that open-minded fans of progressive music check this out, because it is a fascinating ride.

Related posts:

1. Things You May Have Missed 2010: Unitopia – Artificial
2. Bison B.C. – Dark Ages Review
3. Sigh – Scenes From Hell Review