Album Review: Emilie Autumn - Opheliac

Emilie Autumn - Opheliac

Release: September 1, 2006

Genre: Alternative

Label: Trisol Music Group, The End Records

Length: 1:25:41

Nick's Rating: 3.5/5

In my initial review of this record, I said that it had a whole of one really good song and was disgustingly overrated. Let it be said, though, that a month or so worth of letting the record 'settle' will do wonders for your opinion of something. To me, it's this fact that doomed so many records to critical laughing stock status (e.g. Good For Your Soul, Technical Ecstacy), while some of the more undeserving records got showered in praise (Chinese Democracy, to name but one). The professional critic has a deadline to keep and must, therefore, make snap judgements about records he has maybe two days to digest before the review has to be posted. In some cases, the 'snap judgement' approach results in a few critics worth reading, such as Robert Christgau, but otherwise, the quality tends to be low at best. Reading All Music Guide reviews becomes a chore when you want to find informed reviews. In the most roundabout way possible, your average AMG review tells you an album exists, and no more.

I don't mean to sing the praises of average Joe/Jane on the Intarwebs, though, at the same time. Snap judgements come from these users as well, f the sort that can typically boil down to "artist = 5/5" -- in which case, I'll take Mark Prindle first, even at his worst. I have this problem at times, too; with my review of Traced In Air, I had to avoid giving it an instant 5/5. When I thought about Pornograffiti, my first thought was "5/5 slam dunk and most important album of the early 90s" -- but it wasn't. These albums are good, but if my favorite album of a generation can't even get a 5/5 (cf. Traced In Air), you have to imagine just how special a record has to be to get that high a rating. However, that's not really the point, since Opheliac gets a 3.5/5 from me. In the end, that means it's pretty solid, but not the genius masterwork that everyone claims it is. The reasons for this are reasonably few but reasonably glaring.

The first problem is simply the sound. On whole, the album is indigestible. The album makes as much sense together as a good album-length piece should, but at the same time, it makes none at all. The sound of fake genre "Victoriandustrial" used to label her music goes together reasonably well, but then, at the same time, most paradoxically (and amusingly, for that matter), it doesn't at all. The harsh sound of the album (an appropriate backing to the lyrics, which read as one long fuck-you to every man who's ever hurt her) seems very out of place with the actual beauty found in these measures. The main problem with the sound, then, comes from trying to be too many things at once. Autumn wants to borrow a sound from classical music as much as she does from the sound Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails assembled in the early 1990s. Classical music is meat to evoke a variety of moods, of settings; all the Reznor sound can depict is rage and discontent. As such, this combination shortchanges the whole idea of having anything beautiful coming out of your speakers.

Next, we have songwriting. I firmly believe, first of all, that any artist who writes a song called "The Art of Suicide" or "Dead Is the New Alive" cannot be taken seriously. I'm sorry, but I'm just not a fan of someone using generic My Chemical Romance-esque titles for songs. It's distressing, considering everyone considers Autumn to be a great songwriter. Despite songs titled so, Autumn actually does manage to write a few good songs. Clearly she's trying to go for the depressive end of proceedings (no surprise; she completed the record so she wouldn't kill herself), which may explain her otherwise inexplicable popularity. Most of the songs, most of the songs, are good, if their sentiments seem a tad generic and repetitive (see above for a statement of the album's subject matter).

In my first take on the album, I stated the album had a sum total of one good song. I must, however, redact this. There are four. However, together they take up less than twenty minutes... on an 86-minute double-CD. Taken together they form just under twenty percent of the record's full length. That's reasonably above average, since the rest of the CD, with few exceptions, has nothing wrong with it other than the over-arching problems, that the song-writing is repetitive as fuck and the music Emilie wants to make is a mindfuck and hard to listen to in large quantities. The songs I'm referring to, of course, are "Liar," which grants an industrial spin to modern pop music and creates a vocal hook using nightmarish descriptions about (maybe) wanting to reclaim someone who wronged her; "I Want My Innocence Back," which is rather a lamentation, but the sheer monotony is charming; "I Know Where You Sleep," an angry rant where she tries to just do that; and "Let the Record Show," a bit of a last hoorah where it's kind of a shock that she doesn't drop clusters of F-bombs. "Gothic Lolita" comes close for being a massive disparagement of those who suffer (though they'd say otherwise) from Lolita Complex, and almost passes for amusing.

The music is reasonably solid. The voice is a good enough forgery of Annie Lennox to be cute. The lyrics are acceptable. In all, this is one of those overrated albums that will be loved and adored and salivated all over by fans of similar neo-goth ladies with boldness about their sexuality, such as Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls) and could, er... probably find a place next to albums by Rasputina or Nick Cave or a bunch of other artists that eventually got pieces copy-pasted into Autumn's railery-infused gestalt. There's a certain level of genius behind an album like this, which manages to be simultaneously deeply original (the closest she has to an imitator, that I can detect, is Hannah Fury, who comes across as just a cute, empty, spacey girl... while Emilie gives off a vibe such that, if you ran into her in the street, and she were holding anything even remotely sharp, you might wanna run away really fast) and not even a little bit so.

As a closing remark, I still hate Emilie's fanbase, for losing their shit about sexy pictures of her in Bizarre (I think it was), and for losing their shit about those within the fandom losing their shit. Considering her blatant sexuality, someone's pretty much missing the point; would this kind of wank appear if the Red Hot Chili Peppers, just as a fer-instance, appeared in a magazine with their cocks out? I wouldn't wank that wank, that's for sure. Fanatics theorize the next album will be metal-oriented and done better than most modern metal artists, which has my hopes galvanized, but there is no fanbase I think I can trust less than that of Emilie Autumn's. Asking Autumn's fanbase what they think the next album will be like is like asking Axl Rose what he thinks of Chinese Democracy; no matter what you get, 99% of it will be hollow ego-stroking.