One of the cool things about being active in the festival circuit is comparing how bands handle performing under such divergent circumstances. The ongoing Scandinavian Heavy Arts tour featuring Swedish greats Dark Tranquillity and Soen, with support from Andorra’s Persefone descended upon Texas recently, and the Austin date marked the third time we’ve seen all three of these ProgPower USA alumni since the 2026 edition of the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise set sail this past January. To say we weren’t excited to see these three incredible bands performing together again would have been more than just a venial sin.
The realities of life have apparently kept Persefone bassist Tony Coy away from touring outside of Europe – despite this being my fifth time seeing them live, I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing him on stage with his bandmates. This was also our first time seeing them perform without keyboardist/ singer Miguel Espinosa, leaving the band as a quartet for this tour, with Coy and Espinosa’s instrumental parts supplied by backing tracks. Persefone have long opted to perform “Living Waves” with guest singer/ Cynic mastermind Paul Masvidal’s vocal contributions piped in, and as disorienting as this practice can feel – especially from a band that now has two formidable clean singers – Persefone’s performance of their entire set, and this song in particular, is simply mesmeric.
Though it’s not uncommon to see death metal bands behaving with giddy joy while playing, Persefone often supplies the inverse: ferocious performance of stupefyingly complex techdeath with lyrics so uplifting that even non-New Age/ TM types can appreciate their content with no lack of love and devotion. New-ish frontman Daniel Flys did a damn fine job of delivering Espinosa’s vocal parts in “Living Waves,” but fucking crushed it during that final clean verse in “The Great Reality:” “I open my heart, my whole being/ I let the light pass through my fears and shadows/ my inner child, my deepest emotions.” This is fucking death metal?
One of the many highlights of Persefone’s more recent performances is seeing guitarist Filipe Baldaia hopping off the stage and joining the circle pit during that Goliath of a song, and much to our relief, he did not trip and nearly fall face-first into the crowd like happened during their first 70k set this year. The band also chose not to pipe in Espinosa’s singing during this song, and omitted the clean vocals entirely save for the aforementioned parts Flys delivered, concluding the monstrous but far too brief set with oddly appropriate hand gestures directed towards the ravenous audience. Seeing such a perplexing band – this is techdeath for the yoga crowd, for fuck’s sake – receive such a warm response offers hope that metal in general is evolving favorably.
Soen followed with a stirring set of their own, metaphorically setting the venue ablaze with their unique, moody take on progressive metal that outdoes much of the output drummer Martin Lopez’s former band has delivered since he left nearly two decades ago. Guitarist Cody Lee Ford and frontman Yannis Papadopoulos lookalike Joel Ekelöff took full advantage of the downstage riser to tower over their adoring audience, with Ford looking like the guitar hero he is when doing so. Soen has historically delivered stellar performances with ease, grace, and finesse, and they’d be damned if Ekelöff catching what seems to be a common cold will somehow interfere with that directive. Ekelöff typically sings like a fucking god, and while on this evening he merely sang like a demigod, his performance was otherwise unaffected.
Much of Soen’s set featured jarring graphics and animations on the screen that served as their backdrop, but we were not prepared for what was in store for “Primal.” Primed with Charlie Chaplin’s “let us all unite” monologue from The Great Dictator, this explicitly antifascist anthem benefited mightily from their live-inspired graphics projected behind, making this rallying cry of a song the call to action it is. This point was driven home when Ekelöff raised a fist while delivering the line “we are breaking every chain.” Chills, dude. Fucking chills.
Dark Tranquillity has spent much of the last year commemorating the twentieth and thirtieth anniversaries of their landmark albums Character and The Gallery, usually dedicating a third of each of their sets to these two albums. It’s obviously not possible for a band with a discography as sprawling as Dark Tranquillity’s to represent each of their thirteen albums within a single 90-minute set, so to set aside such large chunks of set time to just two decades-old records leaves precious little time for other albums. But Dark Tranquillity also has enough strong material – not a single one of their albums is less than “very good” – to fill their entire set with the excellence that has long been their hallmark. Absolute pros both on stage and in the studio, the Kings of Gothenburg have made a habit of keeping their sets varied so that fans don’t ever get sick of hearing the same old thing, regardless of its greatness.
We’d heard murmurs on the patio that frontman/ bandleader/ Mayor of 70k Mikael Stanne had been nursing a hangover, and a full table of us worried aloud that this might inhibit his legendary dexterity on stage. The first seconds of “Punish My Heaven” assuaged these concerns – if it was indeed true that Stanne was under the weather, there was no detectable sign of that. Stanne and the band he’s assembled are nothing less than death metal rock stars, and are apparently incapable of staying in the same spot for more than three microseconds. So powerful is Stanne’s roar that we could actually still hear him from the back of the club when his mic briefly went out during “The Emptiness From Which I Fed.” “Lethe” followed, after which the band began their triad of character tunes with Stanne half-jokingly wondering if they’d learned anything during the ten years between these beastly records.
If Damage Done was itself a new build for a band reinventing itself, Character was the fully morphed organism realizing its own power. “The New Build” was greeted with the sort of enthusiasm bands of this stature demand, and that fervor didn’t wane an iota when “My Negation” and “Lost to Apathy” followed, as evidenced by both the pits that broke out and the approving smiles on the band’s faces. The post-transitional material that followed the more experimental Projector and Haven has not only aged beautifully, it also remains some of the greatest death metal ever made.
Dark Tranquillity rounded out their set with a selection of songs from Fiction as well as some more recent fare, like “Phantom Days” and “Atoma,” during which I seized the rubber chicken mounted on the scooter some goofy dude with dreadlocks and a broken leg (who had accidentally kicked me where it hurts most) was using, and summarily choked it. I suppose there’s no better way to encapsulate the Dark Tranquillity live experience: they deliver the sort of intensity that brings out the off-color but ultimately wholesome goofiness from a crowd that loves its music loud, its fun questionable, and its moshers protective of the children at the edge of the pit.
Stanne capped the evening succinctly at the evening’s conclusion by uttering two simple words while the madding crowd demanded more over the dulcet tones of Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” signaling the set’s endtime, and it was lost to no one at Come and Take It Live that night that these two words were the guiding principle that has made Dark Tranquillity the most consistently excellent band in metal: “Be awesome.”
The post CONCERT REVIEW: DARK TRANQUILLITY, SOEN & PERSEFONE Tear Through Texas – Techdeath Yoga, Antifascist Anthems & Gothenburg’s Finest Melodeath appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.
