If you ask a metalhead1 what is at the top of their metal Christmas list, a likely answer would be “Make Åkerfeldt growl again” (#MÅGA). After Opeth made the contentious decision to strip out most of the metal and growls on 2011’s Heritage, people were up in arms (as if they blinked and missed that the band did this once before with Damnation). Heritage saw the band continue to evolve and it hit home with this Gator. During the ’10s, Opeth followed this up with works exploring Mikael Åkerfeldt‘s favorite progressive rock bands, an uneven divorce album, and an album that I can best describe as Swedish prog rock band Anekdoten crashing at Mikael‘s home studio. Going into 2019’s In Cauda Venenum, metal started creeping into the band’s sound again, and the writing was on the wall for the next album. My fear going into a new Opeth album with the selling point of “Mikael‘s growls are back!” is that Opeth would regress and feel tired, a safe return to the once established sound. But The Last Will and Testament is an album of contradictions, at once a career retrospective and a continuation of the latest decade of Opeth. It wears the brooding darkness of Deliverance while making detours through the eerie quiet of Heritage, and traverses the scorching progressive MENA-tinged sound of Ghost Reveries while sometimes leaning on the heavy metal vibe that surfaced in Åkerfeldt‘s writing on Sorceress and In Cauda Venenum. Also, an echo of Åkerfeldt‘s work on the soundtrack to the Netflix series Clark plays out “§1,” while the back third of “§3” sounds like something out of Storm Corrosion, a side project of Åkerfeldt and the tragically unknown progressive rock artist Steven Wilson. The Last Will and Testament seems chaotic at first, referencing so many touchstones of Opeth‘s 30 year history. I was unsure what to make of it, but eventually a red thread became audible, making sense of the structure.
The Last Will and Testament is a concept album, the band’s first since Still Life way back in 1999. This is significant, in a way that might not be obvious. The concept of a family gathering to read the will of a rich patriarch that has passed away is simple enough, and lyrically it’s nothing that would win any awards. The music on this album is in service of the story, but rather than the lyrics being important, the element I suspect metal listeners care less about, The Last Will and Testament hinges on its vocals. This is a crucial detail that a lot of prog bands miss, we are not reading a book but listening to music. The words are not of the greatest importance, rather it is how they are spoken and build up that makes the difference. Opeth understand this well as they have bent the music around their most varied vocal performance of their career. Mikael Åkerfeldt has always been a great intuitive singer and a beastly harsh vocalist, but here he gathers all facets of his voice. His growls are shorter and more direct, calling back to his stint in Bloodbath, while his softer moments walk the line between his earliest dichotomy of commanding cleans and fragile croons, augmented by the recent rock swagger he brings from later albums. In a move pulled straight from an Ayreon album, guest singers Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) and Joey Tempest (Europe) play different characters in the album’s story, Anderson‘s commanding voice lending itself perfectly to the various spoken word moments throughout the album.
A second important aspect to The Last Will and Testament‘s character is the changed dynamic of Opeth‘s sound now that they have a new drummer. Waltteri Väyrynen (ex-Paradise Lost) brings a swinging groove that is looser than Martin Axenrot‘s surgical precision and trends closer to Martin Lopez‘s jazzy sway. This looseness makes the songs glide effortlessly between bass-shaking grooves (“§5”, “§7”) and double-kicking death metal (“§1″,”§6”). The music has a great momentum because of this, pulling you along even when it gets lost in the progressive weeds. As always, there are a lot of great performances by the rest of the band. Fredrik Åkesson finds a freedom in shred (“§1”, “A Story Never Told”), Martin Mendez surfaces to lead with his bass (“§4”), and Joakim Svalberg backs up with mournful synths, simulated choirs, and a soulful leading piano (“§7”). The band is tight as ever and keyed into whatever is happening in each moment. Ending things, “A Story Never Told” takes a page out of Opeth‘s more mellow sound, but it ends this smorgasbord of progressive death on an uneventful note as it fails to catch the gravitas that songs like “Burden” have. This victory lap of a song doesn’t detract too much from what came before, however.
So, is The Last Will and Testament the Alien: Romulus of the Opeth franchise? Does it play it too safe? While I miss the experimental nature of the band’s later phase, it uses all that has come before in crowded songs that live by Yngwie Malmsteen‘s famous “how can less be more?” formula. This chaos initially threw me off, but the call and response nature of the vocals to the music and swinging directness of its moving parts lends Opeth‘s latest § a unique character and firm direction that makes up for its flaws. A fan as I am over the last 15 years, I can’t help but enjoy it.
- Big assumption there – Editor ↩︎
