REVIEW: Prog-metal legends Opeth's eclectic Clarke Quay show a treat for die-hard fans

SINGAPORE — It’s always refreshing when a band keeps you guessing whether they’ll come back for an encore.

And that’s exactly what progressive metal legends Opeth did on Sunday (8 December) during their show at Live at the Crossroads in Clarke Quay. Pumped from the brutal guitar riffs of “Deliverance”, the last song of the band’s 90-minute set, the crowd of some 300 fans continued to chant for a good 10 minutes asking for one more song.

In an apparently unprecedented move for their current tour, the Swedish five-piece returned to play “Demon Of The Fall”, a song which frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt claimed they had not played in “over a year”. Still, they pulled off the number – one from their more death metal influenced 1998 album My Arms, Your Hearse – flawlessly and the audience lapped it up.

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For a band that’s used to playing much larger venues, it says a lot that Opeth were willing to give the small Singapore crowd what they wanted. If they didn’t already have the loyalty of their fans here, they surely do now.

While the band are currently touring off their latest album, In Cauda Venenum, they were also well aware that many in attendance had been following their work from across the group’s 29-year history. Opening with the prog-jam “Sveket Prins”, they then dropped into the savage “Leper Affinity” from 2001’s Blackwater Park (my favourite album of theirs), which got the mosh pit going.

The rest of the evening was just as eclectic as the band threw in older tracks like “Sorceress” and “Reverie/Ghost Forest” to please an equally diverse crowd that included people from Thailand, India and even one guy in a John Mayer t-shirt.

Between songs, Åkerfeldt’s dry Scandinavian humour also shone through as he made jokes about how he can no longer headbang and that his current look has people thinking he’s a member of 60s Southern rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd (“We’ve never even heard ‘Sweet Home Alabama’!”).

I admit, I had my reservations about attending a mid-afternoon metal concert at a small, relatively new venue. Buoyed by an excellent live sound mix, what I got instead was one of the best concerts I’ve attended this year.