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Critic Reviews
90
Heritage is a brave album ... It’s almost as though this was made to be a cult album, loved by only a few but loved very intensely by those few.
5y
80
One thing is certainly clear: in a career full of masterful albums, Opeth still continues to make especially phenomenal music and, fortunately for us, the band isn’t showing any signs of becoming stagnant.
14y
80
Love it or hate it, Heritage, for its many excesses and sometimes blurry focus, is a brave album. It opens the door for Opeth to pursue many new directions and reinvent themselves as a band.
14y
80
Those with their hearts in the golden age of prog ... and even those with open minds and hearts entirely, should find plenty to relish in the simultaneously vintage and groundbreaking Heritage.
11y
80
Acoustic and keyboard textures of all kinds blend with unpredictable arrangements and unexpected sonic sidesteps to make an album which confuses, entertains and surprises, all at the same time.
5y
80
By Opeth standards "Heritage" is an addition to the catalogue about which the group can be proud and that fans should enjoy. By anyone else's standards, "Heritage" is quite smashing as a progressive rock album.
4y
70
On Heritage, they could almost be a jazz-fusion band conjured up by a Renaissance-faire magician.
11y
69
Åkerfeldt remembered to include everything here except space for his songs to breathe.
14y
60
Akerfeldt should be praised for breaking free of an often repetitive genre – there’s nothing wrong with radical reinvention. But this departure didn’t need to be quite so lacklustre.
14y
50
The production ain't bad, but I'm still being held back by one major snag: the vocals.
8y
40
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.
3y
Huh...that's odd. I didn't really like this one. I mean I don't hate it, I don't think it's necessarily bad. But damn this one was kinda boring, and uninteresting. And for this album only being 57 minutes, this felt like it went on forever. And the production is honestly even pretty weak, it's just a lot of this album is pretty fucking weak. Now the vocals I still like, but most of the time we barely even get them. 90% is just the instrumental being a huge loop for ... read more
Eh? Sorry for being disappointed but for a lot of this album I really wasn't enjoying it too much, and it didn't have any of the emotion that I look for in this band. I will say that I think that the second half of the album is FAR better than the first part, and I'm hoping as they go on they will go with that sound a bit more
Heritage is very infamous for completely shedding all signs of metal from Opeth's sound. Death growls? Heavy guitars? Nearly any kind of sonic intensity? All gone. And don't get me wrong, this is a MASSIVE falloff compared to the albums before it, but I don't think this is a completely worthless album by any means. They still manage to retain some of the melancholic sorrow from their metal era, the instrumentals can get plenty somber and Mikael's clean vocals are on point as ... read more
Opeth’s lowest rated album, it’s still good but it isn’t really all that interesting or groundbreaking compared to something like Ghost Reveries.
Top 3:
1. Heritage
2. The Devil’s Orchard
3. Slither
Bottom 3:
1. Famine
2. Nepenthe
3. Häxprocess
Production: 79/100
Singing Performances: 8/10
Vocals: 86/100
Replayability: 1/5
Repetitiveness: 2/5
Engagement: 3/5
Overall Album Experience: 3/5
Average Track Rating: 78.0
Overall Rating: 76/100
This album’s biggest sin is its lack of soul. Most Opeth albums are able to keep you enthralled through the whole experience, but not Heritage. It has good moments, and instrumentally it’s mostly tight, but it’s just quite bland in totality. Heritage is also the weakest Opeth album vocally by a wide margin, with multiple songs making me squint in confusion wondering why it sounds like this. I’ve got no problem with the clean direction the band took this album, ... read more
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Track List
| 1 | Heritage 2:05 | 69 |
| 2 | The Devil's Orchard 6:40 | 77 |
| 3 | I Feel the Dark 6:40 | 73 |
| 4 | Slither 4:03 | 71 |
| 5 | Nepenthe 5:40 | 64 |
| 6 | Häxprocess 6:57 | 66 |
| 7 | Famine 8:32 | 65 |
| 8 | The Lines in My Hand 3:49 | 69 |
| 9 | Folklore 8:19 | 71 |
| 10 | Marrow of the Earth 4:19 | 65 |
Total Length: 57 minutes
Comments (4)
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10mo
Bro, pyre and face in the snow are the two best songs on this album and they left them off for special deluxe edition😭😭
