Can you name a band that's less cool than Opeth? For a quarter-century, Mikael Åkerfeldt’s ever-amorphous set of Swedes has let the effort show with every sound, song, and surprising genre twist. At various points in Opeth’s career, their style has been categorized as progressive rock, death metal, or progressive metal, though each of those terms felt, at best, like undersized umbrellas for a band actively coercing bits of jazz, Romanticism, blues, British folk, pop, and new age into their musical madhouse. Opeth is so demanding that, a decade ago, they opted to issued two separate albums—the clenched Deliverance and the much more calm Damnation—rather than package them as an intended, insurmountable double album; still, sold separately, each half of the dichotomous pair broke or pushed the one-hour mark and twisted and turned with a maniacal and delightful zeal. Åkerfeldt’s work has never sounded unaffected or effortless; Opeth have, instead, worn labor and fastidiousness as badges of honor, open rebuttals to any sense of classical cool.
In turn, Opeth is one of modern music’s great paradoxes. They are one of the world’s most popular and enduring heavy acts, having charted every album they’ve made since Damnation in at least half-a-dozen countries. And their international following is a cult of often-unwavering allegiance. To wit, should you arrive at an Opeth show without an Opeth shirt printed in thick and vivid paint, you’ll find that the aforementioned code of cool has been temporarily reversed. Even among the faithful, though, the feeling that Opeth can be forced, overindulgent or obtuse is an abiding one; it is the baggage concomitant to the band’s audacity, the side effect of the quest to shoehorn a dozen things into ultra-dynamic metal. But that same effort enables one of Opeth’s greatest unifying assets: the overwhelming rush that their best music can provide, where a tizzy of elements sends the listener into a tailspin. Line up their catalog from one end to the other, press play, and be stunned by the number of moments (however calculated and meticulous they may be) where audience orientation vanishes. Their complications are their bait.
But Pale Communion, Opeth’s first album in three years, lacks the absolute willpower and prevailing ambition of the band’s best work—that is, the core that made the awkwardness sufferable. This is only the third album where Åkerfeldt foregoes his versatile death metal vocal delivery, following the path of 2011’s Heritage and 2003’s Damnation. He alternately supplants it instead with a singsong lilt, a folk-rock affability and an alt-rock theatricality. Notably, this is the first Opeth LP to arrive since Storm Corrosion, Åkerfeldt’s 2012 full-length release with longtime collaborator Steven Wilson. Half of that album featured the London Session Orchestra, an influence that resurfaces throughout Pale Communion.
In fact, such strings web together the record’s two-song finale—and, really, the 16 minutes of music that save Pale Communion from abject disappointment. “Voice of Treason” is dramatic and lunging, with tumescent strings providing the ballast beneath the song’s seven-minute rise toward the thrall. Just ahead of the end, there’s a momentary blast beat, an enormous wash of strings, and a burst of heroic vocals from Åkerfeldt. “Have you ever seen the aftermath of giving up?” he howls, the band exploding around him. And the stately strings that sweep beneath closer “Faith in Others” are the platform from which Opeth lifts toward a post-rock surge. It dissipates slowly, as though the sound is being peeled apart layer by layer. Opeth surprises and engrosses here, ending this album better than they do most anything else.
Pale Communion often feels too polite to overrun and too guarded to sustain Opeth’s familiar sense of total upheaval, where the listener struggles to remember which end is up and which way is forward. Take opener “Eternal Rains Will Come.” The song first weaves complicated rhythmic shifts against spools of sharp guitar and distorted organ, a compelling mix that suggests a florid spin on math-rock. But after a pause, the quintet springs ahead into a straight beat, flimsy funk dancing beneath quick harmonies cribbed from “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." The instruments coil again toward the end, with the guitar and drums pirouetting in sudden sync. But it’s a hyperactive soft-rock climax, an effete attempt to reach new heights.
Much the same holds for “Elysian Woes,” a trickle of acoustics backed by flute-like synthesizers and led by Åkerfeldt in a rather miserable crooner guise. And “River” is the stiff Swedish approximation of fluid Southern guitar rock. Padded again by acoustic guitar and generous organ, the first half is more pure prairie league than Allman Brothers anthem. But even the ricocheting instrumental midsection and spring-loaded coda feel preordained, like the very blatant ends of Opeth’s Southern rock trial. Likewise, “Goblin,” Opeth’s carousel-like horror score tribute, is as obvious as its name, while “Cusp of Eternity” implies Bono taking an acute, unfortunate interest in the power of djent guitars. Even as it twists and turns through several solos, the destination feels fated, Opeth’s usual inexplicable intricacy given over to plug-and-play automation.
These arrivals of the expected are Pale Communion’s most damning symptom. In the past, Opeth have made their inspirations and aspirations obvious, but their avid recombinations suggested an array of infinite possibilities. Even if you couldn’t abide the inflexibility of their methodical grandeur, it was hard to condemn the immense effort and imagination involved. But Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other. It’s not that Opeth isn’t cool here. It’s that these eight songs run cold on new energies and ideas, a rarity for a catalog custom-made to overwhelm.
