Katatonia

Live at The El Rey Theatre

Los Angeles, California

March 29th, 2017

Review and Photos by Travis Baumann

Katatonia are a Swedish melodic metal band that have transformed and mutated greatly over their 26 year career. Starting off as a death and doom metal band in 1991, they steadily grew more progressive as well as melodic, especially in the vocal delivery.

A signature element to Katatonia's sound is their inherent melancholy emotional arc that carries the majority of their songs both lyrically and vocally but also musically.

While still maintaining some heavy moments with building crescendos of guitar and drums, the vocals never reach back to their original growled extreme style. Plenty of bands sing that way, but no other band has the vocal sound or delivery as Jonas Renkse offers.

Jonas is joined on stage by his co-founding partner, Anders Nyström on guitar and backing vocals, along with Niklas Sandin on bass guitar and relative new comers; Roger Öjersson on second guitar, and Daniel Moilanen on drums.

With a career as lengthy and storied as Katatonia's, you often find set lists stretching deep into the back catalog of their work to appease long-time listeners. Due to the drastic transitions the band has gone through, they definitely focus on their later era's sound. Tonight they did not travel back further than 2001's "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" as this album represented the largest turning point for the band.

2016 saw the release of the band's tenth studio album with the moving and emotional, "The Fall of Hearts". They opened up the set with "Last Song Before the Fade" from this new album which was a great introduction to the show.

Katatonia are extremely moody, with a dimly lit stage which occasionally would burst with explosions of bright backlighting that left the band silhouetted and mysterious.

Jonas is an eccentric performer, preferring to sing from the shadows, his hair blocking his face so that it is almost impossible to get a sense of what he looks like. I generally love to watch a vocalist perform and see the emotions on their faces but this is not necessary as his voice carries so much emotional strength that you get carried up in the songs as the music and vocals wash over you.

They played "Criminals" from the "Viva Emptiness" release before performing two songs back to back from their second to latest album, "Dead End Kings" with "Dead Letters" and "Buildings".  I am a big fan of the "Dead End Kings" release so I was happy to hear these two.

Returning to the latest album they did "Old Heart Falls". "Teargas" from "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" is always a crowd favorite and got a good cheer when they started playing it.

The El Rey is done up like an old-time ballroom with chandeliers and lush velvety walls. Jonas commented how much they like playing here and it is a perfect venue for them as it adds to the intense tripped-out quality of their music and stage show. The crowd was full and enthusiastic, some of them head banging, but most just swaying with the music, entranced by the waves of music and emotional story telling.

"Evidence" was followed by "Ghost of the Sun" both coming from the "Viva Emptiness" album before they branched off into the first of songs from "The Great Cold Distance" album with "Soil's Song".

"The Great Cold Distance" is often cited as a masterpiece and perhaps their greatest effort. They would return to it tonight more than any other release and even ten years after its debut, it still resonates as timely and powerful.

Interspersing the latest material nicely with these older songs, they played "Residual" before returning to the aforementioned album with "In The White". Landing on the only song from the "Night is the New Day" album, we got "Forsaker" before then returning to the "The Great Cold Distance" album once more for the awesome, "Leaders".

They ended the main set with another new song, "Passer" before leaving us to cheer and shout for more. After a short break, they returned and would give us a trio of songs for the encore, two of which were from "The Great Cold Distance". "My Twin" was up first, breaking into the excellent "Lethean" from "Dead End Kings" before finishing out the night with "July".

The band all gathered together with their arms around each other and did the "Euro bow" for the crowd and had big smiles on their faces. The dark, Gothic tone of the night was uplifting and beautiful despite being so heavy and melancholic at times, perhaps a nightly form of catharsis for the band members.  

I really enjoyed seeing these guys again, they are consummate musicians with spot-on sound. Jonas' vocals are at the center of it all and sounded perfect tonight, just as they did the previous time I got to see him play back in 2012. Their stage shows are weird journeys; trippy and moving and just all around awesome.

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