Hi everyone!

After seeing all the SORROW memes on Reddit, I decided to try and find out what words were actually the most prevalent in Opeth's vocabulary.

I used a corpus analysis tool called SketchEngine, which allows you, among other things, to analyze the vocabulary of a set of texts.

I created a corpus based on the lyrics provided by Genius.

It includes 126 songs, which amounts to a total 18217 words.

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The slideshow hereabove includes:

• Top 50 Nouns
• Top 100 Nouns
• Top 100 Keywords
  • (words that are relatively rare in English and therefore make Opeth's vocabulary stand out)
• Top 100 Adjectives
• Top 100 Verbs
• Top 100 Adverbs
• s o r r o w
  • 28 hits in total, the most sorrowul album being Watershed with 8 occurences

I've also made an imgur album that includes longer lists (of all nouns, keywords, adjectives, verbs and adverbs) if you want to dig a little deeper: Opeth: A Lexical Analysis (continued)

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A few remarks:

• Only studio albums are included.
• Bonus tracks written by Opeth are included, but covers are not.
• Swedish lyrics have been removed so they wouldn't pollute the results.
  • (I used the English version of the album In cauda venenum, even though the original version is technically the Swedish one)
• The sections that are in "backwards English", like the backwards speech in Hessian Peel, for example, have been reversed into regular English.

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Thanks for reading!

Epilogue

In my opinion, it's The Lotus Eater. It has the elements that make Opeth great, but it's also quite pacy, which admittedly is not something you can say about many of their songs.

I also specifically don't think Burden is a good intro. Sure, it's pretty accessible, but to the point of being unrepresentative of their work.

Which classical pieces do you consider have some sort of "Ophetian" sound, although Mikael has never mentioned amongst his influences (as far as I know) names of classical musicians, I found that Opeth has some sort of impressionistic vibes in their harmony.

I saw a comment in Marrow of the Earth video that mentioned Erik Satie, and I couldn't but acknowledge it was right, the opening track Heritage had also a recognizable Satie influenced sound, although this later is jazzier.

The first track that came into my mind that could perfectly be the initial track of an Opeth album was Gnossiene if it was arranged for an acoustic guitar playinng chords, electric playing the melody with some occasional harmonies, bass, some remote strings or mellotron, and additional occasional ornaments like an ascending harp, and some background noises.

I would like to know what do you guys think, if there are other artists or pieces you consider have an Opeth like sound that could somehow be recognized as a direct or indirect influence on Opeth sound.

Is there any official site? I am kind of new into record collecting and all. I wanted to see is there anyone who got their Storm Corrosion vinyl copy from the trusted site...