154. Opeth
Wembley Arena
19 November 2016
Let’s get one thing straight: the last time my friend and I saw Opeth, we fell asleep. It was at the Roundhouse, and somewhere around song four, both of us gently nodded off in our seats, lulled into a doom-riffed stupor. To be fair, we were dog-tired going in, but even so, it's not every day a metal gig becomes a lullaby. And it wasn’t entirely the band’s fault. Let’s just say that when you’re wrapped in a slow, metronomic doom riff for long enough, it stops sounding like music and starts feeling like a womb.
But this was different. This was Wembley Arena. This was prog metal in full, thundering, fire-breathing extravaganza mode, and let it be known: not one eyelid in our party was closed at any point. If anything, they were wide open as waves of serpentine riffage and time signature shenanigans battered us into stunned, beard-stroking alertness.
Frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt strutted onstage like a 1974 guitar magazine cover, all hair, cheekbones and dry Swedish wit. He may be the only man in metal who can switch between death growls and deadpan stand-up without anyone blinking. “Nice to be here,” he mumbled, “last time I was in Wembley, I was selling sausages.” Quips aside, the man commands a stage like a Valhallan wizard.
The sound came in like an avalanche, layer upon layer of molten jazz-prog-metal fusion, baroque shredding, doom-soaked balladry and the occasional unexpected detour into Swedish folk-inspired melancholy. Every song was an odyssey. Some of them may have required visas.
Newer cuts from Sorceress mingled perfectly with the classics. “Ghost of Perdition” arrived like a summoned beast. “Deliverance” was, dare I say it, funky in places. And when the heavier passages hit, it was like standing inside a cathedral made of valve amps.
There were no flashy pyros. Just five world-class musicians, performing the sort of music that sounds like it requires both a PhD and a darkened room to process properly. The crowd was the usual mix of devoted, bearded, extremely polite, and all nodding in precise polyrhythmic appreciation. You don’t mosh at an Opeth gig. You ponder. It is Sabbath with a maths degree.
By the end, as the final chord rang out and the crowd roared their approval in awkward 9/8 time, it was very clear we had witnessed this band at the absolute height of their powers, indulging every complex musical whim, and somehow still making it land. This wasn’t a lullaby. This was a bludgeoning. And it was glorious.