Morningrise Reviews

Right there in the league of Swedish melodic death metal bands with really long songs (I need to coin a name for that genre and save a few keystrokes), Opeth releases this, their second album. There are five songs total on the album and not one of them is shorter than ten minutes. That right there should scare off the attention-span impaired.

Now that they're surfing elsewhere, let's discuss exactly what Opeth puts forth. If you happen to be an avid follower of the European, especially Swedish scene, the name Opeth isn't a total mystery. Singer/guitarist Mikael Akerfeldt has appeared on Edge of Sanity records and in return former E.O.S. mainman Dan Swano helped record this epic piece.

Musically, and even within one song, these guys go all over the map. Generally the songs flow well from one part to the next, though individual songs are not immediately noticeable. The twin guitars work well with each other, creating some great melodies in the guitars, and often lasping into very tasteful acoustic moods. In my opinion, it's difficult to write on guitar intricate songs that fully involve the listener, but Opeth manages to keep your attention. The bass tends to loop around the guitar lines and reminded me lot (in tone, maybe) of the old American experimental thrash band Watchtower. Singer Akerfeldt has a wide range of vocal approaches from hoarse black metal screams to somber melodies.

The best thing about this album is that each new listen further enhances the absolute majesty of the music. Soon you'll begin to anticipate the movements of the pieces and be drawn into it. I admit I fell in love with this album while listening to it during a huge sunrise lightning storm in Utah. Trust me, the music completely fit into the scheme of things. Absolutely recommended.

Review by John Chedsey

My Trip back through the Opeth back catalogue brings me to their sophomore effort "Morningrise". This album has only five tracks on it but don't be fooled into thinking this is an EP. This is a full-length album and again the adjective brilliant comes to mind.

The first thing I noticed while listening to this was the great improvement that Mikael has made in his vocals since this release. Not to say the vocals on here are bad but they have much more range and emotion in later releases. I also think the production has gotten better but I am a fan of the warmer sound they have now compared to what they had at this point. Another thing I noticed while listening to the album was how much more abrupt the changes from distortion to acoustic are as opposed to how much more they seem to flow on "Still Life" and "Blackwater Park".

As with the last three albums I have reviewed the songwriting and guitar work are absolutely incredible but I wasn't really expecting that to change anyway. Oddly enough the other thing that I have really come to enjoy with Opeth is the lyrics which is kind of weird considering I am not all too concerned with lyrics in general. I usually don't care as long as the music is good. At first you get the feeling they are strictly poetic with no real point beside what you yourself think but the more you read them while the music plays the more you start to understand. Of course then again I could just be seeing something that really isn't there but who cares this is some good shit so don't burst my bubble...heh. The further I go back among their albums the more surprised I am that there wasn't massive hype about this band much sooner.

Overall another excellent album worthy of extremely high praise and what would be a masterpiece for most bands turns out to be just another great album from the genius that is Opeth. Highly Recommended.

Track by track

Advent-9

The Night and the Silent Water-8.5

Nectar-9.5

Black Rose Immortal-9

To Bid you Farewell-9

Review by Christian Renner

To put this masterpiece into words is virtually impossible, because what OPETH have created with "Morningrise" just is not from this world!

1 album, 5 songs, altogether 66 minutes of playing time, and each and every second an essential part of the whole. Here you find everything, aggression and emotion, calm and anger, heaviness and mellowness, everything in one song, yet never sounding like different parts, but always in a flow.

The four Swedes haven't exactly changed since their debut "Orchid", rather matured, combining accessibility with complexity, melody with heaviness in a truly masterful way, which shows, what the human mind is capable of.

Heavy parts with Death Metal-vocals are interspersed with almost fragile acoustic passages and clean vocals, flowing together into a union, which made OPETH a truly unique band. I only want to pick out one song, which is "Black Rose Immortal", more than 20 minutes long, yet within that not even one second too long, unifying all the facets that are OPETH, a musical masterpiece for itself.

Packed into a brilliant production this album is ESSENTIAL (very, very capital) for EACH Metal-fan, who thinks that he is one, because you really have to have heard this for yourself!

Review by Alex

It's a cool November morning here [2000, for those wondering] in Atlanta, and for some reason or another I've been awake since about 6am. Not really out of bed, just awake. Don't know why. I threw on Morningrise and just laid back in bed and listened. Not just listened, but really LISTENED and let it become my entire consciousness. For two complete spins.

First off, I've considered Morningrise my favorite album for quite some time, yet I probably haven't listened to it in a couple months what with all my other listening duties and a bunch of other useless excuses I could give. It's a special album anyway, not the kind that SHOULD become your every night dinnerware... more like the fine china you pull out when you want the meal to be special, if that makes any sense.

But anyway, today I did listen once again.

Wow.

This is still the most perfect album ever recorded.

And you know, after those two spins I'd gotten out of bed, powered up the machine, and had every intention in the world of writing the most powerful testimonial that this album has ever received and once again I'm stopped dead in my tracks realizing that I can't write anything that praises this album highly enough. So just some thoughts...

The only thing that can be labeled a proper 'song' is the first part of The Night and the Silent Water. And I don't care. The meandering nature of the pieces works perfectly. You're in one place, and you travel along a path, and you're in another place that you're only in for a few moments and then you're off to somewhere else. The more I hear of the softer 'dancing in the dandelions' kind of really mellow prog the more I'm convinced that Opeth is the only metal band to do this correctly at all; nobody else is even close. Perhaps this is why My Arms Your Hearse is my least favorite Opeth album [that opinion since revised. Heh], as the shock between the change from this style to a more riff-oriented, more standard metal style was a shock to me. When off of MAYH is still my single favorite Opeth song however. But so many metal bands when they do this kind of thing, you can tell that they are a metal band adding in other influences.

Morningrise sounds like it's unintentionally and just coincidentally metal. It really sounds like it is music that was just done in whatever way it was done, and that it just happened to be expressed (partially) in a way that we call metal. And it might even just be the vocals. If this album was released with just Mikael's softer clean vocals that appeal here, would this have been a metal album at all? Sure it has some pretty intense guitar amongst all the meanderings but then again so does a lot of prog. Just something to think about.

I like Mikael's clean vocals here. Sure, he's not as good in the strictest sense as he went on to be, but his almost tentative nature to be found here fits in with the not as focused nature of the music.

Black Rose Immortal, 7:22-8:56, is the greatest passage of music I have ever, ever heard.

... and being the judgemental asshole that I am, and reading the messageboards and mailing lists as I do, I notice some things about people and I'm about tomake some generalized statements that might piss some off but I don't care. Those who like MAYH or Still Life better than Morningrise seem to me to caremore about metal itself than about good music... which sounds strange coming from me, the man with 1000+ metal CDs. But that's the sense I get. And those who would proclaim that Opeth flat out sucks, just seem to me to not be interested in music at all in any form, but rather attracted to other things about noise coming out of their stereo. I'm not talking those who dislike Opeth (and I don't understand that either) because taste is taste, but those who can't recognize Morningrise especially as having anything worthy at all, I will bet you all sorts of money I don't have that even if you took music completely out of the factoring, I wouldn't get along with this person on any level personally. It's just the feeling I get.

Mikael was absolutely insane to not keep De Farfalla. Period. That wanting to keep a bass a bass nonsense just doesn't hold up when you hear just how much a healthy dose of lead bass lifts this music up.

The more personal nature of the lyrics on Morningrise are another thing that make it a much more intense listen than the stories that would follow. It's incredible how everything changed after this album. The lineup, the style, the lyrics...

Just writing this Morningrise has gone through almost another full spin of its 66:07. I have to give Dan Swano his share of credit because he is responsible for the actual sound of the thing. There is something transcendent, just not of this world, like the entire album is out of place, not of this time, like some fragment of another existence fell out of the sky and was packaged up and given to us as Morningrise. And more than anything else it makes me truly sad to know I can't ever be part of that existence and know what a world would be like where an album like Morningrise is the expected norm, where an album like Morningrise is what the average person puts on when they want to listen to music. Can you imagine such a place???

I guess to wrap up... Opeth has never released less than an excellent album. But they have only released one perfect album.

Review by Jim Raggi