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