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Read more...Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Opeth @ Sound Academy, May 4
A metal show on a Monday night? Upstanding citizens should know better than that. But wait, this isn’t just any beer-soaked, headbanging rollick. We’re here to see Opeth, Stockholm’s gentlemanly purveyors of death metal laced with unmistakable sophistication and majesty. Crafting ornate opuses that fuse sheer brutality with delicate flourishes of folk, prog, jazz, and blues, these troubadours specialize in highbrow, thinking man’s metal. This is aggressive music for people who read leather-bound books, whose apartments smell of rich mahogany.
OK, so maybe there aren’t too many polished types at the Sound Academy tonight. The greasy-haired, black-clad masses are sloshed and jostling after pre-drinking during an exhilarating Viking metal-meets-post rock set by Norway’s Enslaved. As soon as the lights go out and Opeth drop the Godzilla-sized drones of “Heir Apparent” from last year’s Watershed, all manners fly out the window. Fans collide against each other in a clusterfuck of beards, B.O, and pot smoke while frontman Mikael Akerfeldt goes guttural over a never-ending kaleidoscope of blast-beats, fist-pumping riffs, rustic passages and demented solos. “Ghosts of Perdition” from 2005’s Ghost Reveries follows suit with screams and monstrous chugging riffs, only to collapse into a hushed acoustic interlude that sees Akerfeldt cooing in a falsetto cleaner than Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
“It’s a lovely day today,” the soft-spoken Akerfeldt remarks in between songs. “We went down to the Centre for Performing Arts and had oysters. Is that good for our street credibility?”
Akerfeldt, arguably the most polite man in metal, continues the Jekyll/Hyde act throughout the evening, switching back and forth between dulcet croons and deathly growls as he and his cavalry ransack the band’s archives, yanking out oldies like “Godhead’s Lament” from 1999’s Still Life and “The Night & the Silent Water” from 1996’s Morningrise. These are dark, shivering epics riddled with Voivodian time changes and labyrinthine arrangements, sprawling through endless peaks, valleys, cliffs and slopes. “Hessian Peel” begins with pastoral Zeppelin III-style fingerpicking, drifts into a synth-addled Floydian sway, gets rudely interrupted by an eerie non-sequitur piano solo, explodes into a fit of snaky Arabic-scale riffing and burns out with an off-kilter, Meshuggah-esque monster groove courtesy of drummer Martin Axenrot.
At one point, Akerfeldt pulls off a feat previously unfathomable at a metal show: he successfully goads the crowd into a sing along of “Summer of ’69.” “Is it a guilty pleasure to like Bryan Adams?” he asks. “I fucking love him.”
As if taking heed to Akerfeldt’s repeated requests to “hush now,” the audience becomes noticeably more subdued as the show progresses, attending to each eight minute-plus composition with the patience and reverence of Zen monks at a sutra reading. During the clean but tension-filled parts in songs like “The Lotus Eater,” metalheads all around me close their eyes meditatively, mesmerized by the tightrope precise intricacies. They remain ardently focused, knowing these deftly quiet passages can morph into convoluted deathly churns — or in this case, a Castlevania-esque keyboard breakdown — in a nanosecond, all the while sounding as natural as breathing. After the 13 minute encore performance of “Deliverance”, people are standing straight, saying “excuse me” and exiting in single-file form, freshly reared in Opeth’s school of refinement.
This review originally appeared on EyeWeekly.com
One Day As A Lion - One Day As A Lion EP
With little talk of a new Rage Against The Machine album and a waste bin full of scrapped collaborations with everyone from ?uestlove to Trent Reznor, Zach de la Rocha has decided to take the reins, writing his own riffs on a distorted keyboard and recruiting ex-Mars Volta drum god Jon Theodore to lay down the beats. One Day As a Lion’s debut EP sounds like a Rage demo in its nascent stages; songs lurch forward with the same behind-the-beat pull and bottom-heavy fuzz, but gone is Tom Morello’s wacky ride-the-scales shredding. The focus here is on de la Rocha’s sharp, arsenic-soaked rhymes, which lick shots at American media control (“Wild International”), terror-watch lists (“Ocean View”) and religious fundamentalism (“Last Letter”). While his delivery is mostly laid-back, Theodore displays short spurts of virtuosity, such as the pummelling man-beast fills on “If You Fear Dying.” The disc only falters when de la Rocha attempts to sing some of the hooks, sounding like a pissed-off Patchy the Pirate.
This CD review originally appeared in Eye Weekly
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The Crystal Method - Divided By Night
Did Doc Brown accidentally zap us a decade back in time, or is ’90s big beat suddenly in vogue again? Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook and The Prodigy made comebacks this year, so it’s an opportune time for The Crystal Method to follow suit. But don’t whip out the glow sticks just yet; Divided By Night’s tinny beats and endless noodling sound more fit for a Bowflex commercial than a rave. Some choice guest spots by Matisyahu (“Drown In The Now”) and Emily Haines (“Come Back Clean”) provide tiny jolts of electricity, but not enough to jump-start this somnambulant stockpile of comatose grooves, sexless synth lines and dinky blips and bleeps. It’ll take more than 1.21 gigawatts and a flux capacitor to make this blast from the past sound exciting.
This CD review originally appeared in Eye Weekly
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Monday, May 11, 2009
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