Live Review: Amorphis in Osaka – Redemption at Umeda Club Quattro (September 12th, 2023)

There are concerts that you remember because they were spectacular, concerts that remain in your memory because something unexpected happened on stage, and then there are those rare nights that change the way you look at a band forever. The latter are much harder to explain. Nothing necessarily has to go wrong or extraordinary circumstances need to take place. Sometimes you simply walk into a venue carrying a certain idea about a band and walk out carrying an entirely different one. That was precisely what happened to me on September 12, 2023, when Amorphis took the stage at Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka.

The Finnish band were in Japan to promote Halo, their latest album at the time, and the Osaka date was the first of three Japanese shows, followed by two consecutive nights at Shibuya Club Quattro in Tokyo. The Osaka concert was scheduled for 7:00 PM, with doors opening one hour earlier, and unlike many European metal tours, there was no opening band. That absence of a support act created a rather peculiar atmosphere before the concert, because the audience seemed to be arriving directly from very different parts of everyday life. Among the black shirts and long hair there were quite a few people still wearing office clothes, presumably having finished work only a short while earlier and headed straight to the venue. There was something wonderfully Japanese about the whole scene: the working day had ended, the city was still moving outside and inside Umeda Club Quattro a completely different world was about to begin.

The venue itself was almost perfect for the occasion. Umeda Club Quattro is not an enormous hall, and that was precisely what made the evening work so well. Amorphis did not have to fight against a gigantic festival stage or an arena designed to accommodate tens of thousands of people. They were close enough to the audience for every movement to feel immediate, while the room itself provided that particular intimacy that makes a concert feel like an event shared by the people inside it rather than a spectacle happening somewhere in front of them. The official schedule confirms the 18:00 doors and 19:00 start, with the show presented as a standing concert.

And yet, for all the things I can say about the venue, the Japanese audience or the atmosphere, the most important part of the story begins much earlier than that evening.

My relationship with Amorphis had been complicated for years. I had fallen completely in love with Tales From the Thousand Lakes back in 1994, and that album had established an image of Amorphis in my head that proved remarkably difficult to dismantle. The combination of death metal, Finnish mythology, melancholy and those extraordinary melodies had turned the record into one of those albums that becomes almost sacred to you. Once that happens, change can be dangerous. When Tomi Joutsen joined the band and Amorphis moved further away from their early death-metal identity, I simply did not connect with what I was hearing. There was a time when I was unable to separate the music from my own expectations of what the band should be, and the arrival of a new vocalist with a completely different visual and musical identity only reinforced that distance.

I had actually seen Amorphis less than a year before the Osaka show, but the experience had done little to change my opinion. I was there, I watched them, I heard the songs, and somehow I remained almost completely indifferent. Looking back now, it is difficult to understand how I managed to miss so much, but sometimes musical prejudices are more stubborn than musical ears. I had effectively placed Amorphis inside a box labelled Tales From the Thousand Lakes and had decided that everything outside it was somebody else’s band. Osaka was the night that box finally broke.

The concert began with Northwards, followed by Bad Blood, The Four Wise Ones and The Moon, immediately establishing the Halo era before the band took a brief journey back to their earlier catalogue. The setlist was extraordinarily well balanced, moving between seven different studio albums and showing just how broad the band’s musical history had become. Four songs came from Halo, while Queen of Time contributed three and Skyforger, Tales From the Thousand Lakes and Under the Red Cloud supplied two apiece. Eclipse and Elegy were represented by one song each. And then came Into Hiding.

There are songs that sound great on record and songs that suddenly reveal an entirely different dimension when they are performed in a small room. Hearing Into Hiding in that environment was one of the first moments of the evening when my old connection with Amorphis collided with the band they had become. It was not a matter of choosing between the old and the new. The song was unmistakably the Amorphis I had loved in 1994, but it was being performed by a band that had spent decades developing a much broader vocabulary.

Black Winter Day followed, and at that point resistance became increasingly difficult. If there was ever a song capable of acting as a bridge between the two versions of Amorphis that existed in my head, it was probably this one. The melancholy was still there, the Finnish atmosphere was still there and the melodies were still unmistakable, but the performance had an enormous sense of confidence that made the years between Tales From the Thousand Lakes and Halo suddenly seem much less like a betrayal and much more like a journey. The real revelation, however, was standing in front of Tomi Joutsen: he sounded spectacular.

That may seem like an obvious thing to say about the singer of a band, but in this case it was precisely the element I had underestimated. My old prejudice had made me focus far too much on the visual and stylistic differences between the Amorphis of 1994 and the Amorphis of the 2020s. Seeing Tomi deliver these songs in person made the mistake obvious. His clean vocals were powerful and expressive, his harsh vocals retained the necessary weight and, more importantly, he possessed the range required to move between the different eras of the band’s catalogue without making any of them sound out of place.

The setlist itself was almost designed to demonstrate that versatility. Silver Bride and Sky Is Mine represented Skyforger, while Wrong Direction and Heart of the Giant brought in the more progressive and melodic side of the later catalogue. Seven Roads Come Together and On the Dark Waters returned to Halo, before the band moved into My Kantele and House of Sleep. Instead of hearing a band that had abandoned its past, I was watching a band that had somehow managed to carry that past with them without becoming prisoners of it. That distinction sounds obvious now. It wasn’t obvious to me then.

The audience seemed to understand this far better than I did. There was an extraordinary sense of unity between the band and the people in the room, with the Japanese crowd responding to the songs with a precision and enthusiasm that made the entire concert feel remarkably fluid. Nothing seemed forced. The band played, the audience reacted and the whole thing simply rolled forward. There were no awkward moments, no sense of the musicians trying to manufacture excitement and no point where the performance seemed to lose momentum. Even the absence of a support band seemed to make sense in retrospect: this was not an evening that needed another act to warm up the room. Amorphis walked on stage and took complete possession of it.

The contrast between the people inside the venue and the world outside was also difficult to ignore. Osaka was carrying on with its usual rhythm, while inside Umeda Club Quattro a crowd containing metalheads, long-time fans and people who had seemingly come directly from an office job were singing along to songs inspired by Finnish mythology. There was something almost cinematic about that juxtaposition. Japan has a peculiar ability to make even the most mundane situations feel strangely surreal, and watching a man who looked as though he had just left a corporate office singing along to Amorphis was one of those tiny details that I knew I would remember.

By the time The Bee appeared during the encore, the transformation was complete. The song, originally from Queen of Time, had become one of the band’s defining pieces of their later period, and hearing it live after everything that had preceded it made the evening feel almost like a conversation between different versions of the same band. The concert ended with My Name Is Night playing from tape, bringing the evening to a close after roughly ninety minutes on stage.

But the real encore was waiting for me back at the hotel. This is where the story becomes slightly embarrassing, because the concert did not simply make me enjoy Amorphis more. It forced me to reconsider years of musical prejudice. During the days that followed, while still travelling through Japan, I started going back through their catalogue. Albums that I had previously dismissed were suddenly demanding my attention. Songs I had never bothered to understand began making sense. The period I had considered a departure from the band I loved started revealing itself as a logical progression, and Tomi Joutsen stopped being the symbol of that change and became one of the reasons it worked so well.

There is something wonderfully liberating about discovering that you were wrong about a band. It does not happen often. Usually, when you have listened to a group for decades, your opinion becomes increasingly rigid. You know which albums you love, which ones you tolerate and which ones you will never bother playing again. You develop a personal mythology around the band, and eventually that mythology can become more powerful than the music itself. Amorphis forced me to confront that. I had spent years comparing everything they did with Tales From the Thousand Lakes, and in doing so I had effectively denied myself three decades of music.

The Osaka concert did not erase Tales From the Thousand Lakes. Quite the opposite. It made me appreciate it differently. The old songs sounded just as powerful as I remembered, but now they existed alongside Skyforger, Eclipse, Queen of Time, Under the Red Cloud and Halo. The band’s evolution no longer looked like a series of steps away from the music I loved. It looked like a road that had begun in the same place and simply continued far beyond the point where I had stopped following it.

Perhaps that is why the concert feels so important in retrospect. It was not necessarily the biggest show I have ever seen, nor was Umeda Club Quattro the largest venue I have ever visited. There were no spectacular guests, no extravagant stage production and no historical anniversary to turn the night into an obvious event. There was simply a band playing extremely well in a relatively small Japanese venue, an audience completely in tune with them and a vocalist who sounded extraordinary. Sometimes that is enough.

When I returned home at the end of September, Amorphis were no longer the band I had spent years refusing to understand. I was still listening to Tales From the Thousand Lakes, naturally, but now I was putting on Elegy, Eclipse, Skyforger, Silent Waters, Skyforger, Under the Red Cloud, Queen of Time and Halo with the curiosity of somebody who had suddenly discovered a huge section of a band’s history that had been sitting in front of him all along. And perhaps the strangest thing of all is that none of this required Amorphis to change.

They had not needed to return to 1994 to win me back. They had not needed to reconstruct the sound of Tales From the Thousand Lakes, bring back an old vocalist or pretend that the last thirty years had never happened. They simply had to play the music they had spent those decades creating, in a small club in Osaka, in front of an audience that understood the band better than I did. I went into Umeda Club Quattro thinking I already knew what Amorphis were. I walked out realising that I hadn’t been listening properly. And sometimes, after thirty years of music, discovering that you were wrong is one of the best things that can happen to a fan.