>>.PREVIEW
OPETH
Thursday, March 9
MacEwan Hall (U of C)
"Are we a Stevie Wonder band playing death metal or are we a death metal band playing Stevie Wonder?" asks Opeth guitarist Peter Lindgren.
"We’re always gonna be labelled a death metal band because of the vocals. If people read the name death metal, they get scared. And we’re far more than that…. You could mention a hundred bands we’ve ripped something off of… I mean innovated," he laughs.
Let’s be honest here. While most bands like to think that they defy genre classification, they’re all pretty much running around the same old mouse wheel and aren’t so much influenced by their favourite bands as they just blatantly (apparently not to themselves, though) rip them off.
This is why Lindgren has every right to say something so potentially pompous. Opeth isn’t the easiest band to classify, thanks to a constantly changing style that relies on a few immediately definable elements.
This Swedish outfit is one of a few bands that truly do bend and morph so many diverse styles of music that pinning them down to a specific scene is pretty much eenie-meenie-miney-moe guesswork.
Take the band’s Deliverance (2002) and Damnation (2003) as prime examples. Where the former was an outright take on death metal with subtle progressive elements, it was offset by the complete structural 360 of Damnation, a new twist in Opeth’s decade-long recorded career, offering up acoustic balladry and meticulously crafted structure.
Then, just when we think we’ve got them pegged, they put forth their latest effort, Ghost Reveries, a sprawling commingling of its two predecessors that is the first time that such diametrically opposed styles have been fused together so perfectly.
Rounded out by bassist Martin Mendez, keyboardist Per Wiberg, drummer Martin Lopez and singer-guitarist Mikael Akerfeldt, Opeth continues to push further and further into the heavy metal forefront.
Lindgren says that one key element was vital to the band’s success and personal infatuation with the creation of Ghost Reveries.
"To us, we wanted a new direction. (That came via) the addition of a keyboard player as a member. We wanted to take advantage of him and really use his skills. Damnation and Deliverance were two albums that were separate in their sound so we wanted to combine the two into one album with the dynamics of the old stuff like Blackwater Park (2001). We never really look back or try to re-create. We want to do our best album ever, but not in comparison to what we’ve done before."
Lindgren does admit, though, that despite the seemingly overwhelming difficulty of uniting these disparate genres, it’s not exactly unbroken ground for Opeth. They’ve done it before, making the task more cheer than chore. And with that fertile ground effectively broken, the band has the opportunity to delve further into territory they’ve always desired to explore.
"Now that we’ve crossed those bridges, we feel like we’re free to do what we want."
You can see where the "progressive" element of their description comes into play. Factor in a new band member means and the foray into previously unattainable directions and one can almost understand Lindgren’s most unusual analogy for Ghost Reveries.
"(With a new member), you get more inspiration. Compare it to cooking – if you always use one spice and then you get a new one, it gets a lot more interesting because you can do new stuff. That’s what happened here. All the stuff we’ve talked about before but couldn’t achieve… we can do that now." |
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