Opeth & Enslaved at Manhattan Center, or, 8 Flights of Stairs to Hell

So what used to be Hammerstein Ballroom, where I have seen many a great metal show (an even a not so metal show - Muse - who were still great) is now called "The Grand Ballroom at Manhattan Center." The room is pretty big, I most recently saw Megadeth there with Children of Bodom, In Flames and Job for a Cowboy, somehow missing High on Fire who went on at fucking SIX O'CLOCK. I actually wanted to see them the most. Sigh. Anyway, I didn't think much of the name change until actually arriving at the venue, waiting in the rain, and realizing the line was taking so long because they had tables set up outside the venue to seriously look through people's bags, like the cops do in the subway. This was my first clue that something was amiss. They confiscated all umbrellas and even the chick in front of me's apple. No fruit allowed at metal shows I guess. How dare you try and bring something healthy in during the METAL! :P

When we got inside finally we were directed away from the main room, which is right there, and told to go up the stairs. And boy were there stairs. It was eight flights up, and a LOT of stairs. Just when you thought there weren't anymore stairs, behind a door, there were more stairs. It was weird. And it was sold out because it was smaller than the main room. they could have sold more tickets if it had been downstairs. Very odd.

I walked in and Enslaved were already on. I don't know them well but I was curious to see them; I heard they were supposed to go on at 7:50 (doors were at 7) but at 7:35 they were already a few songs in. However, I was not sad I missed some of their set as they played an awful lot of similar mid-tempo stuff and I was slightly bored. A few of them are cute though, which definitely helped the sitch.

Between Enslaved and Opeth, I went to look at the Opeth merch. The only girl-sized shirt they had was WHITE. WTF? I am 5 feet tall and 98 pounds I need a damn wee shirt. But I really don't know what to say about a white metal band's shirt. They had a black denim jacket with Opeth embriodered on the chest area for only ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR! Sweet! I'll take two! And it had studs on it! Someone went crazy with the bedazzler, Woop! I also noticed that Opeth carries men's shirts up to a size XXXL. No, I did not type in one X too many. That is triple-X. So then I thought, maybe they put the show on the 8th floor so that one of these morbidly obese FBs would have a heart attack and die on the stairs, making for awesome black metal press. "Obese American Kid Drops Dead at Swedish Metal Show!"

Opeth came on and had really great sound. For not being the main part of this club, the sound system was really gorgeous. Mikeal Åkerfeldt (and yes, I just figured out how to make that little thing over the A, crazy Swedes!) has an amazing voice and since I hadn't seen them live before I was really pleased to hear it was awesome live. Sometimes you go see a band and the singer sucks live because their voice is shot or they are just getting old (cough, ozzy, cough) but this dude's voice is smooth as buttah when it needs to be but growly as a wild beast in the Swedish forest when necessary. They did some older songs which was nice and about 9 songs total; remember, some of these songs are long, before coming back for a 10th, Demon of the Fall, which was pretty great. Their light show was cool too, and there was even a guitar solo. Rad! Hahaha. I enjoyed it but I'm so jaded nowadays a band has to practically stick dynamite up their asses to impress me these days. I mean, I saw Metallica at L'amour in 1984. Back when they were good. 'Nuff said.