"We are bringing death metal into the halls of high culture," says Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt from the stage at London's Royal Albert Hall, but he's only sort of right. Åkerfeldt can emit guttural snarls with the best of them, but it doesn't tell the whole story to tag Opeth as a "metal band." Culturally, they're metal, longtime titans of the ridiculously fertile Scandinavian scene. But musically, they're prog. Their songs regularly go way past 10 minutes and frequently break into Ren-fest traveling-minstrel frippery. In this ridiculously huge box set's liner notes, they thank Joni Mitchell and Scott Walker alongside Morbid Angel and Ronnie James Dio. Death metal is Åkerfeldt's favorite toy, the same way the band's 1970s forebears loved playing around with traditional English folk or Howlin' Wolf, but the band makes a huge show out venturing across as much landscape as possible. And inside the ornate venue, they look very much at home. A stoned, pasty mass of British people swaying and headbanging as a group of curtain-haired virtuosos wheedle out extended multi-movement works-- this is something that could've happened at any point over the last 40 years.
Over three CDs and two DVDs, this box documents one show, which stretched across nearly three hours. Opeth were celebrating their 20th anniversary as a band, so they played one album, 2001's masterful Blackwater Park, in full, then picked one song per album from all their other albums. This is a neat idea to showcase the band's musical evolution, but Opeth hasn't exactly had a ton of musical evolution, at least not on record. They were playing these wide-ranging epics from jump. And on a live album, it's not like you can hear the differences in production between all these different records. It just feels like one endless wander after another.
Everything about In Live Concert is extraordinarily well-done. The recording is full and warm, and nothing ends up buried the way things often happen on live albums. The DVDs are nicely shot and crisply edited-- professional pieces of work where nobody involved got too showy with anything. The band, obviously, plays everything with just ridiculous amounts of technical skill; they wouldn't set off on these staggering epics if they weren't total wizards on their instruments. And over all these discs, there's a ton of material to process. The second DVD comes with a 45-minute life-on-the-road documentary, one that doesn't bother with anything as distracting as subtitles. Even if you speak Swedish, the thing probably isn't terribly interesting-- and yet, they know there are superfans out there who will absolutely eat this up. If you're an Opeth superfan-- and the band has plenty-- you probably already have this thing on pre-order, and you won't be disappointed.
But anyone not already absolutely converted will have a tough time with the sheer volume and density of this box. Ideally, a live album that touches on every era of a band's career should serve as a pretty good introduction to that band's work. That's not the case here-- and, really, it never could be. Opeth are an albums band, and the way they organize their set around their albums bespeaks that. They like their works to be long and immersive, and even the best-recorded live album can't swallow you up into its world the way Opeth's albums do. Opeth's records seem to convert their own environments, giving you time to roam over all their peaks and valleys. Playing live, they just seem like dudes doing very impressive things with their instruments. That's an easy thing to admire and a tough thing to love.
