They are great though... But I do not enjoy the last two albums... They really need more inspiration because those ones suck really bad but everything before is great. Specially the debut.
I haven't actually got round to the new MDB yet, but I personally thought A Line of Deathless Kings was something of a return to form. MDB's releases had been tailing off in quality for me since The Light at the End of the World, as they slowly lost the death metal elements and then the violin and piano, which I thought gave them a lot more texture as a band. I particularly liked 'The Blood, The Wine, The Roses' which I would pick as one of my top songs of 2006, and 'The Child of Eternity' off the Deeper Down EP. Unfortunately I think MDB will always suffer from my perspective from being unable to ever top Turn Loose the Swans, and everything that takes them further away from that sound is kind of a dissapointment for me. Also, I know plenty of people who will claim that MDB, Paradise Lost and Anathema are not 'real' doom bands and are scornful of people for liking them beyond maybe the obvious releases that are of most interest to doom fans. I've got to say that personally I find the work of both Paradise Lost and Anathema to get progressively less interesting as they went on and became drunk with their commercial success on the continent. I have similiar feelings about bands from related genres who have undergone a similiar pattern, such as Amorphis, Moonspell, Theatre of Tragedy etc., though I feel Amorphis have started to get back on track of late, and they were great when I saw them live a couple of years ago.
Also, I wasn't implying that Opeth ripped off Edge of Sanity, though Edge of Sanity released Unorthodox before Opeth even had a stable line-up and the influence is undeniable. I was simply saying that Edge of Sanity are better than Opeth. The main reason for this is song-writing. Opeths long track lengths more often than not seem to me to be symptomatic of an inability to write cohesive songs, and even a lot of my favourite Opeth songs could easily be reworked into two or more seperate tracks and be much improved for it. Apart from the obvious exceptions of Crimson and Crimson 2, Edge of Sanity displays none of this meandering, unfocused tendency. Both Swano and Dread Axellson can write some mean metal. I will agree that Opeth are a lot of fun live, but you must admit they do have a tendency to get lost up their own arse on occasion, not just musically (I think part of the unfocused songwriting is too much of a concentration on the song as concepts rather than, well, songs) but also lyrically, though they are hardly the worst offenders even in the melodeath field; and at least they seem fairly competent at english, unlike, say, old In Flames bizarre ramblings about 'squirrel wheels' and how 'conflict serum is my aura'.
Electric Wizard are doom of a very different beast. In my head, the whole stoner doom/sludge field of bands like Electric Wizard, Sleep, Ramesses, Bongzilla, Buried at Sea, Weedeater, Grief etc. is distinctly seperate from say, St. Vitus, Witchfinder General, Cathedral, Reverend Bizarre and Pentagram. Some sludge bands even resent being called metal at all.
