YMMV / Opeth

• Awesome Music:
  • While many fans dispute on which songs deserve the title, it is unanimously agreed by all fans that the epic title track of the epic Blackwater Park album deserves it. "Bleak", from the same album, is also considered an example by most fans, as is "The Drapery Falls".
  • "Black Rose Immortal" off of Morningrise is a fan fave, most likely because you must be a true fan to make it through the song's ridiculous length.
  • Of course, there's also those who take Ghost Reveries, Still Life, or My Arms, Your Hearse as their most epic album (when it's not Blackwater Park). Hence songs like "Demon of the Fall" or "Ghost of Perdition" get a lot of love too.
  • "Alting Tar Slut", or "All Things Will Pass" in English. Whichever version you listen to, it's easily one of the band's most beautiful songs to date.
• Broken Base: Opeth's new direction after Heritage has been this by fans, to the point some fans will attack and mock fans and the band due to their new direction, feeling it's '70s rip off music'.
• Ending Fatigue: A possible complaint with some of their music. "The Grand Conjuration" seems to get this the most frequently, since despite its Epic Riff, it's fairly simple in comparison to most of their material, but still goes on for a good ten minutes.
• Epic Riff:
  • A lot of them. "Blackwater Park" may rule supreme over all of them, though.
  • "Deliverance" has a four-minute outro that has not one, but two of them over top of each other.
• Epileptic Trees: Many speculated that Mikael Akerfeldt was one of the nameless ghouls in the Swedish hard rock band Ghost. Some feel that he downright gave it away with the band's cover of "I'm a Marionette" by ABBA, as he's a huge fan of them (and has been known to wear their shirts during Opeth concerts). Further cementing the claim is the fact that Mikael jokingly admitted to being a member of the band when he toured with them and Mastodon on the Heritage Hunter tour of 2012; these same fans apparently missed the memo that half of what Mikael says onstage is pure snark, and that he followed the "member of Ghost" claim by also admitting that he wrote all of Mastodon's songs. Alas, it was ultimately Jossed in April 2017, when former Nameless Ghouls sued Ghost lead singer Papa Emeritus, exposing all their identities. Mikael was not one of them.
• Franchise Original Sin: The metal fans alienated by Opeth having dropped death growls and gone full prog from Heritage onward tend to give Damnation a pass despite the latter being a Lighter and Softer album with no real metal elements. This is due in part to Damnation still maintaining the spirit of the band's quieter moments and being recorded at the same time as their heaviest album, Deliverance. In contrast, Heritage goes all out in its throwbacks to 70s prog rock, is a stand-alone work, and was released at a time when more dedicated fans were becoming more aware that Mikael had been losing interest in metal for a while, and that was before subsequent albums confirmed that the change in direction was intended to be permanent.
• Funny Moments:
  • Mikael during this little speech.
  • Even funnier than that, they got pizza delivered on stage.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Opeth fandom is known to have a Steel Panther-like parody called "Akerstache" that associate itself with cock rock-like music (in vein with poking humor at the band) and connecting it to Nickelback, "Ho Yay" subtext, and "soft furry kittens" only for in 2016 in the band's published biography that Mikael had a friend who was in a "cock-rock" group called Crimson Cats.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Akerstache is this for fans and arguably detractors.
  • Asking the band to play "Black Rose Immortal" live.
  • OPTEH
• Narm: The awkwardly quick acoustic passage followed by the even more awkward drum solo at about 8:45 in "To Bid You Farewell", otherwise a massive Tear Jerker.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The disturbing face appearing on Watershed's artwork. It is composed from pictures of the band's members.
  • "THE EYES! OF THE DEVIL! FIXED ON! HIS SINNERS!"*brutal guitar riff*
  • There's also "The Leper Affinity". "Your gaze covered with virgin snow, Rigid features." Pro tip: it's about having sex with dead people.
  • The scream at the end of Black Rose Immortal.
    • And pretty much the entirety of Black Rose Immortal in general.
  • The video for "The Devil's Orchard".
• Tear Jerker:
  • The closing track "Isolation Years", from Ghost Reveries.
  • "Hope Leaves", along with most of Damnation.
  • "Burden"
  • "Black Rose Immortal" after around 9:40 and excluding the Last Note Nightmare
  • From the same album, "To Bid You Farewell"
  • And pretty much every other Surprisingly Gentle Song.
  • The acoustic sections in "Dirge For November."
  • A heavier example: the aptly titled "Bleak."
  • "Face of Melinda", ever ever so much.
    • It's safe to say the entirety of Still Life is pretty heart-wrenching, being A story of an atheist returning to his religious home to find his beloved only to lose her in the end and himself be executed by the end. It thankfully gives us a bittersweet aspect with him reuniting with her by the end.
  • My Arms, Your Hearse, in spades.
    • Here's a little fun game: While it rains, play the album, by the end of it, you'll be swarmed with emotions.
  • Four words: Demon.of.the.Fall.
  • The video for "Universal Truth" is pretty damn sad, about a man whose relationship with his wife abruptly ends and he spends months wondering what went wrong. After months, he goes crazy and conducts a puppet show to see if he can piece it together... only for the puppets to end up having it better than him, leaving him eternally heartbroken. An added Reality Subtext considering the rather messy divorce Akerfeldt went through in 2016 makes it worse.
  Time won't heal any wounds you have
  A few set years of your life are stolen
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some fans had this reaction to Heritage from the moment word got out that it was dropping death growls completely and jumping headfirst into prog rock. Amusingly enough, this also has traits of Be Careful What You Wish For, since one of the most common complaints lodged against Opeth by "casual fans" and people who tried to get into them - hell, even among some of their fans - is that their music keeps alternating between jazzy, '70s prog rock and straight death metal, and it wasn't uncommon to hear this followed up with something to the effect of "I wish they'd pick a genre and stick with it!".
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • While Opeth doesn't have a huge Broken Base, many fans feel Heritage alienated fans, all while Pale Communion seemed to have strengthened the base - being considered an improvement over Heritage by being more refined and having more of an Opeth feel while still maintaining its prog style - with a small minority still not satisfied with Opeth's new direction.
  • And then in 2019 came In Cauda Venenum, an album that seemed to do the impossible and finally unite both sides of the debate. While still not a death metal album, it still had enough metal elements to counter balance the '70s prog worship, resulting in a VERY enjoyable, heavy, balanced and catchy record. And the fact that there's both an English and a Swedish version results in two versions of the album to enjoy, both having unique strengths.

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