13/04/03
Opeth, Alchemist, Flesh Mechanic
The Metro, Sydney Australia
Reviewed by Kev Truong

With this possibly being the most hotly awaited and anticipated tour of the year, even the fact that it was on a Sunday night didn’t stop the tickets nearly carrying themselves out the door. Indeed, the Metro announced that the show had been sold out weeks beforehand. With that in mind, it was a little disappointing (although hardly unexpected) to see large portions of the crowd just filing in as Opeth were due to start, meaning they missed national supports Alchemist in their glorious live return from a god-knows-how-long hibernation. First off though were Flesh Mechanic. There seems to be a lot of talk about this particular young band, and there’s certainly no argument that they’re a diverse bunch that can string together some pretty disparate sounds and influences. Unfortunately though, and maybe it’s just me, they just seemed to get up there and play a whole lot of nothing. Yes, they were tight, and yes, they’re all quite adept at their instruments (except the vocals, which were kind of ordinary), but they played songs that seemed to go nowhere and churned out riffs that just didn’t stick. They cite luminaries such as Meshuggah and Dillinger Escape Plan as influences, and rightly so too, but sounding like the greats doesn’t make you great. It is clear that the groundwork is there however, so I think even more so for this band than others that some good old-fashioned experience will be healthy for them.

Next were the band that really kicked the night into high gear: Australia’s finest, Alchemist. Since they hadn’t shown their faces in Sydney since something like February 2001, many people were just as excited to see them as the Swedish tourists, and some of them even more so. Starting off with a sneak-peek from their upcoming Austral Alien album, a typically lush and multi-faceted affair dubbed ‘First Contact’, Alchemist enchanted all and more than made up for lost time with tonight’s crowning achievement of a set. The Metro’s quality PA pushed the band’s performance to new astral heights as they blanketed the audience with layer after layer of detailed sound. The richness and textures of ‘Chinese Whispers’, ‘Yoni Kunda’ and a necessarily truncated ‘Evolution Trilogy’ enveloped and ensconced, while ‘Garden of Eroticism’ and ‘Surreality’ were among some old staples that were enhanced by new intro samples. Relegated to a support role, they couldn’t really stretch their wings all the way out tonight, but Alchemist were brilliant regardless. Finest band in Australia? We’re talking one of the finest bands in the world.

Of course, Opeth are also considered one of the finest in the world, and I’d say mostly due to exposure they’re considered so by a larger audience too. Impossible not to respect them for the level of musicianship and proficiency they operate on, one of the most unique and identifiable acts around these days swooned and courted the audience with more or less note-perfect performances of their amazing material. With the unavoidable drawback of having to perform their famous acoustic passages on clean electric, I highly doubt that any of Opeth’s multitudes of rabid fans walked away from tonight disappointed.

Opening with the sweeping tones of ‘The Leper Affinity’, no harmony or minute accent was overlooked as the band stayed completely faithful to the original versions (bar the aforementioned lack of acoustics, of course). Every guitar line, every cymbal splash and every lilting vocal melody was delivered perfectly… and the crowd loved it. Drawing mostly from the more recent albums, the foursome covered the whole spectrum of their eclectic sound, ranging from the more aggressive ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Demon of the Fall’ right through to the sombre ‘Credence’ and the inspired flash of morose brilliance that is ‘A Fair Judgement’ (complete with somebody shouting out “hurry up you fuckin…” right at a key pause in the song, which, depending on how you look at it, was the height of rudeness or damn funny). In between the two extremes lay the likes of ‘Godhead’s Lament’, ‘Bleak’ and ‘The Drapery Falls’, and they even reached back to the Morningrise album to pull out ‘Advent’. Visually, they’re not the most exciting band around, unless your eyes are glued to the fretwork of the two guitarists Peter Lindgren and Mikael Akerfeldt, but then again not everybody can prance around like KISS now can they.

Kev Truong