‘The Last Will and Testament’ – OPETH at The Pearl, Las Vegas

Friday, February 20th, 2026 – Katatonia is a band that I had first heard (if I had to put a year to it) in 2006. I was a teenager in search of heavier music than I had yet experienced before, and Sweden was at the time, entirely new horizons to develop my taste for extreme metal. The Gothenburg and Stockholm metal scenes don’t need much introduction. The likes of At The Gates, Opeth, Entombed, The Haunted, Dark Funeral and Arch Enemy were so exciting (and still are) that a death doom band wasn’t really grabbing my attention at the time. Much less the added gothic elements later on.

So I slept on this band unfortunately. Listening to them now and live at The Pearl is a very different beast. At the core I don’t see them as that different. The lack of screaming vocals is obvious, but Katatonia does have a brilliant sense of melody that manages to stand out even amongst the plethora of excellent Swedish metal bands.

So I fucked up but there is a large discography left to explore and if you’re somehow reading this and death metal isn’t your thing I suggest starting with their latest album ‘Nightmares as Extentions of the Waking State’ for a more gothic and progressive Katatonia.

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As for Opeth – it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve seen them live, and another ten years before that! The Las Vegas stop of the second edition of Gigantour was, for years, hands down one of my favorite experiences of live music ever. It was one of two or three stops on that tour that had a stripped down bill of bands. Featuring that night was Megadeth, Lamb of God, Arch Enemy and naturally Opeth. I still tell the same dumb joke about how Opeth had an hour set, but could only manage to play five songs. The shortest song being over five minutes long and the others well over ten minutes each.

A decade later, I was moving back to Las Vegas and after unpacking the moving truck, Courtney and I were on our way to see Opeth. At the time Opeth had released my favorite of their albums of the primarily prog rock era, ‘Sorceress’. It didn’t blow me away like ‘Ghost Reveries’ did more than a decade before, but I was listening to that album more than most records I picked up that year because it did feel like a more gradual shift in direction than ‘Heritage’ did. Now that one was a bit of a mind fuck, but it’s not like they dropped their whole back catalog from their set list.

That was also the first time I’d been witness to, and in person to front man Mikael Åkerfeldt showcasing that if this touring musician thing doesn’t work out after all, he has a stand up comedy to fall back on. The man is a hilarious shit talker.

Now having seen Opeth a third time in two decades, I can confidently say that you should hop on a plane and see this band perform live tomorrow and I don’t much care how far away that is for you. This actually reminds me that several months before I moved back to Vegas, I had nearly gotten my passport so that I could fly to England and see Opeth perform ‘Ghost Reveries’ start to finish.

Courtney had expressed she was surprised at how talkative Mikael is live and I’ll admit to feeling betrayed. Seeing Opeth was one of our first nights out together as grown-ass adults and she didn’t remember every little detail of the evening. Heart-fucking-broken over here.

Not for long as the band put on what amounted to a all killer no filler set list spanning a massive chunk of their history including tracks off the latest record as well as some of my all time favorite tracks such as “Master’s Apprentices”, “The Grand Conjuration” and “The Drapery Galls” before closing out the evening with “Deliverance”.

If you’re going to be lame about it and not fly across the country, or the world to see Opeth, at least be decent enough to listen to their latest record ‘The Last Will and Testament’.

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