ORCHID

"What else could possibly go wrong?" That's the thought that comes to mind when I think of this album (I'm past the point of being able to listen to it). Pretty much everything about this album makes me recoil in disgust, and keep in mind that I'm a severe Opeth fanboy. This album reeks of very generic death and black metal sounds, the songwriting isn't very mature in my opinion, Akerfeldt is still working on his death growls, and to make this pile of dung even worse, the production quality is absolutely as bad as it can get for a 90s album. It sounds like Opeth tried to record this album in a factory where all the machines were breaking down at once. Akerfeldt uses practically no clean vocals, his death growls aren't yet up to par, and the instrumental work is very average for Opeth, although the fact that the drummer is awful drags that down some. Unfortunately, Opeth wouldn't get the correct formula down until it reached Still Life, however they did at least improve on each of their next two albums. As for this one however, nothing seems to go right. If you feel you must get it to complete your Opeth collection, resist the temptation. You'll get a few semi-prog moments and ideas of what's to come later on in Opeth, but you won't get any of them fully developed on this album. I'd normally have sympathy and give this 2 stars since there are a few good ideas beginning to be developed, but the awful production quality brings it down another star, causing me to give this album a mere 1 star, although I'm not sure if it even deserves that.