Opeth | Eagles Ballroom | 11 October

After a quasi-career-spanning set of music that featured world debuts of two songs off forthcoming album THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT, Opeth emerged for an encore to wrap up the first night of their North American tour in the Eagles Ballroom. First they played the title track off their 2016 album SORCERESS, a good song but not ‘show finale’ material. “We would like to play one more song,” frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt remarked, “before we have to travel…to Cleveland.” The chorus of tongue-in-cheek BOOOs seemed to take him by surprise. “Cleveland no good?” he asked, amused. “We have that with Norway, what you have with Cleveland. We hate those fuckers. And they hate us,” the charming Swede went on. “We’re gonna play a song, it’s our ‘Paranoid’, our ‘Breaking The Law’, our ‘Detroit Rock City’…” and every middle-aged metalhead in the crowd knew what was coming: “Demon Of The Fall”.

We were all wrong, though. Despite the much-touted return of death-metal growls to Opeth’s new material, the band still shied away from their oldest, heaviest work Friday night. They’d been playing “Demon” at recent festival stops in Europe, and nearly every night on tour the past couple of years, but prior to that it had become somewhat of a rarity since Opeth entered their retro-prog era around 2010. It was definitely their “Paranoid” when I first came across them around the turn of the century. Does Åkerfeldt get to rewrite his own history like that?

This is a guy, after all, who titles his albums ‘DAMNATION’ and ‘DELIVERANCE’ and ‘WATERSHED’ and ‘HERITAGE’. Moreover, as Opeth have changed, so has their fanbase; the Ballroom was not a sea of swirling hair, there was no mosh pit. In fact, for the first time in my life, there were assigned seats—on the ballroom floor! Was this an effort by the Rave to curb moshing? In any case, it provided gainful employment for a gaggle of teenagers, ushering confused patrons to their folding chairs inside a roped-off area. Plus there were two other concerts going on in the building simultaneously: Canadian pop-punk band Marianas Trench, and ERNEST, whom I assume is some sort of Jim Varney tribute act.

Upstairs opening act Tribulation (no, not the Milwaukee party-thrash band from the ‘80s) is another former death-metal act who like Opeth have broadened their stylistic palette over the years and softened somewhat in the process, primarily showcasing their goth/doom tendencies for this set. Their presentation came off a little hodgepodge; you wouldn’t necessarily have thought these guys were all from the same band to look at ‘em, and the same could be said for their songs, but the disjointed proceedings came together powerfully for set-closer “Strange Gateways Beckon”.

Opeth emerged to the obscure strains of “Seven Bowls” by Greek prog legends Aphrodite’s Child. Once situated, they ripped straight into the brand new “§1”, the opening track from the new album, which was originally scheduled to be out in the world on Friday but is now due November 22nd. However this track, along with “§3”, have actually been released in advance; unfortunately for eager fans, these would be the only two new songs in the set. However, the thrill of hearing the full range of Åkerfeldt’s voice in the context of these riveting new tunes was a long time coming, and the fans, who mostly remained seated through Tribulation’s set, were almost all on their feet now, and they received the new material as rapturously as the classics.

As far as the classics go, there were approximately zero surprises in the setlist. The oldest tune was “Face Of Melinda”, the only song they play any more off their 1999 landmark album STILL LIFE. However, old-school fans could take heart at the band’s overall heavier leanings; only three songs from their previous four albums made it into the two-hour show, and only “Eternal Rains Will Come” struck me as, well, filler. Åkerfeldt, whose banter tends to be almost as entertaining as his music, expressed his affinity for the “V-shaped setlist” multiple times, and bringing the intensity down in the middle especially makes sense when you need to stop grinding your vocal cords to dust for a few minutes. That’s the point when you should be trotting out as many songs off DAMNATION as possible instead of just “In My Time Of Need” every night. (But that was sure a fantastic singalong moment.)

It was during this middle part of the set that it occurred to me how much Opeth’s fanbase has probably changed over the years. People were way into this mellower proggy stuff, whereas 20 years ago they would’ve started throwing beers at the stage. It’s entirely possible that generations younger than me came upon Opeth during the psych-rock revival of the late-aughts and early teens and think of the group’s metal leanings as fringe. The Milwaukee crowd definitely didn’t skew as middle-aged as I expected; maybe the younger folks are actually the dominant faction of the fanbase nowadays, as suggested by the mile-long merch line the entire night.

If so, perhaps Opeth can now retrofit them with an appreciation for death metal—not the stupid misogynistic cartoon violence the genre was once known for, but the more thoughtful, progressive style Opeth basically invented in the early ‘90s. It’s definitely back in vogue thanks to bands like Blood Incantation forging new paths within it. When Opeth busted out “The Grand Conjuration”, for instance, which until this year had been on shelf since 2017, it sounded fresh as ever, partially due to some tweaks in the arrangement perhaps, but it also made me wonder if progressive death metal stopped evolving 20 years ago, waiting for Åkerfeldt to get interested in it again.

If that means pretending the first three Opeth albums don’t exist, I guess I’ll take it. I’m more excited for this new record than I have been for an Opeth release in a very long time, and Friday’s show made me feel a lot of stuff I haven’t felt in almost as long. Opeth remain a mighty force as a live band; new drummer Waltteri Väyrynen handled the full scope of the catalog with aplomb, and the group evidently employs some of the best sound engineers around, because the Eagles Ballroom actually sounded GOOD—not GREAT, but in that room, good IS great. And when they finished their final song, “Deliverance”, despite what I thought it SHOULD’VE been, I felt no disappointment. It is a great song, maybe even an iconic song, especially if you consider Opeth a 21st-century band. If that’s the way Åkerfeldt wants it, fine—but remember Mikael, the internet is right here! We SAW that you played “Black Rose Immortal” in Istanbul a couple months ago! We are not gonna let you forget about your past. But thanks for giving us so much hope for your present and future as well.