Opeth’s latest full length offering, Watershed, has been released on Roadrunner Records and created quite a stir among the mainstream metal press. Reviewers are praising the album, some going so far as to call it the greatest piece of progressive metal material written to date. Having listened to the album I have only one thing in response to say to all of these so called “experts”; HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! Are you fucking serious?

Watershed opens with the appropriately titled "Coil" a three minute melodic… I don’t even know what you’d call it, it’s certainly not metal, it’s just an acoustic guitar with clean and gentle male and female vocals. I’ve heard heavier and more metal material on a Poison acoustic song.

Moving on… "Heir Apparent" starts out interestingly enough with dark heavy riffs, which gets interrupted by a melodic piano piece, before morphing back into a metal track with Domination-era Morbid Angel vocals, complete with the ridiculous processing effects, you know the ones, where every once in a while it sounds like the vocals are swirling in and out, like a powerful fart being drowned out by a fan. From there the song goes all over the place, with Opeth sometimes using dark heavy riffs, and sometimes using flamenco picking on an acoustic guitar, sometimes mixing in some really off the wall keyboarding. It’s pretty much a fucking disaster put to audio.

Next up is "The Lotus Eater" which starts with some off key humming, followed by more metal-ish riffs, flamenco picking on an acoustic guitar and a mix of the overly processed David Vincent-esque vocals and clean vocals so soft and gentle it sounds like they got the guy with the lightest loafers from a production of The Phantom Of The Opera to sing alongside them. There’s some keyboards in there too. Jesus fucking Christ! What the fuck is this? Pick a genre and stick with it, this isn’t being progressive, this is just being obnoxious and not knowing how to write a decent song so you write eight and try to cram it all into one.

Finally the fourth track, "Burden", is here. The more I listen to Watershed the more of a burden reviewing this album becomes, but at least I’ve made it beyond the midway point. It’s not like things can get any worse can they? Oh… wait… this song starts with more melodic acoustic guitar playing and fruity vocals. I can’t believe people actually pay to listen to this shit, why would you spend your hard earned money on listening to a bunch of fruity Swedes and Uruguayans… Uruguois? What the fuck are they called anyway? As Homer Simpson once laughingly pointed out “Ha! Ha! Look at this country! U R Gay! Ha! Ha!” Thus far Opeth have only made that joke more appropriate.

Next up is "Porcelain Heart", which I can only assume is a reference to a giant turd shaped like a heart that’s sunk to the bottom of the bowl. Again, more clean piano playing, clean vocals and acoustic guitars before more metal riffs spurt out like my ass after eating McDonald’s. What do they put in that stuff, skunk anus and rotten cabbage? By this point in listening to this album I can’t even pretend to be interested. This is what hell must be like.

Sixth song is next, an eleven minute and twenty-five second track entitled "Hessian Peel". Fuck me. I’d rather be in a horrible car crash, my legs pinned beneath the steering wheel as the car slowly starts to sink. More fruity melodic music. These guys must have been bards at some ye olde county fairs and could just not get over how faaaaaaaaaabulous their tight pants and puffy shirts were. This entire album doesn’t even contain two minutes of redeemable material, and I’m being generous by even offering the hope that there may be a minute and a half worth of music that doesn’t completely fucking suck.

Final track "Hex Omega"… finally! Can these “talented musicians” pull a decent song out of their asses or is this going to be another steaming pile of doo doo?

*listens to the first minute*

Doo doo it is, then. I’m not even going to fucking bother listening to the rest of this.

I know there are people out there who like this shit, why, I have no earthly idea. I really can’t figure it out. First of all, the music is not good. You can rant and rave to me until your face turns blue, but there’s no way you can convince me that a single minute of this album is either music or good. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy melody in my music, I can even enjoy some folk and Celtic music fused with my metal, take, for instance Aeternus‘ …And So The Night Became an album that fuses folk music with dark death metal and black metal. It’s got melody, it has strong song writing, it has powerful unprocessed vocals, it even has keyboards which are extremely well played. Then you have Lykathea Aflame’s Elvenefris which is a perfect mix of the most extreme metal and the most melodic Eastern European and Middle Eastern melodies and is truly a beautiful piece of music. You can even make an argument for a recent offering like Australian melodic death metallers Be’lakor’s The Frail Tide, which fuses melodic death metal with atmospheric black metal and Celtic folk metal.

Opeth’s Watershed and every release that has come before it, on the other hand, is shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. SHIIIIIITTTTTTTT!!!! The song writing straight up sucks, there’s no decent flow between one piece of material and the next, everything is just stacked one on top of another like a giant shit sandwich and you know what? No, I wouldn’t like to take a bite. Not at all! The people who praise this band are either completely ignorant to what decent music is or they’re just mindless fools who’ll praise whatever people tell them to praise, either way, Opeth is NOT worthy of the praise they receive. At all. If they could write a decent song, then yeah, I’d get behind them, but this is pure and utter shit.

I know people are going to claim I’m full of shit, have no idea what I’m talking about, that I’m just a fan of “brutal” music and I hate everything, and that’s fine, my musical opinions aren’t a secret and anyone who’s read through a random mix of mainstream and underground metal material will know that my tastes vary. I can appreciate the music of a melodic ambient band like the Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber project Delerium which has used singers like Sarah McLachlan and Matthew Sweet. It’s actual melodic MUSIC. I can easily listen to it, no problem. Opeth… is not music. It’s not metal. It’s not melodic. It’s not progressive. It’s not Scottish, and it is CRAP!

I’m done talking about this stupid band. I’m sure I’ll get all kinds of angry responses from Opeth fans for writing this review, but if you actually like this terrible, terrible band then your opinion on anything related to any form of music is meaningless to me. If you want to listen to GOOD progressive metal, check out any of the releases by Intronaut. I’m going to go throw this CD in the garbage, then set my garbage can on fire. Fuck this!

Written By: Teufel