Just when it seemed like Opeth had settled into a comfy groove as the kings of tasteful, leather elbow-patched prog-metal that goes heavier on the ‘prog’ part of the equation than the ‘metal’, the Swedes have only gone and thrown a curve ball with their fourteenth album. The banner news here is that The Last Will And Testament marks the return of frontman and chief architect Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death growl, a throwback to their early days as an extreme metal band and catnip for disgruntled fans of their more grown-up incarnation.
In truth, this return to extremity – deployed sparingly and strategically, rather than across the whole album – is the least of The Last Will’s inventiveness. Åkerfeldt has enlisted the unlikely dream team of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Europe singer Joey Tempest to help bring this conceptual tale centred on the tribulations of an early 20th-century family in the wake of the death of their patriarch to life (Edgar Allan Poe does Succession, basically). It’s divided into eight chapters, listed as §1 through §7, plus the less maverick A Story Never Told, lending it a whiff of literariness that further elevates it beyond the progmetal herd.
