As Axl told ya’ll, I was down in Northeastern Kentucky this weekend setting up a homestead for the soon-to-be-built MetalSucks Mansion Appalachia Annex. That shit is real! My first stop was at a Home Depot just over the border in West Virginia to buy supplies. As I was tooling around the store with a shopping cart full of random odds and ends, some dude looked at me quizzically, and perhaps a little skeptically of this bearded New York Jew he asked “I don’t mean to be nosey… but what are ya’ll doing with a hatchet and a cooler?” If I’d been on my game I would’ve come up with a witty/metal answer about chopping bodies up or something, but I failed. Maybe I should’ve just said “Just going out to the dance club, you know, usual night on the town.”

Anyway, the drive to and from KY is not a short one. We got a bit of a late start, and as night fell we were somewhere in the sharp, angular hills of West Virginia, the rolling, jagged green cliffs holding dense, white fog like something out of an epic metal music video. As daylight quickly faded, it was one of the most serene and beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen. The mood called for Opeth. Blackwater Park became the soundtrack of choice and was the absolute perfect match for this epic, epic part of our journey. Not gonna lie, I was kinda pretending in my mind that we were driving through the Swedish wilderness. Not that I actually have any idea what the Swedish wilderness looks like. West Virginia = Sweden??

Here’s Opeth performing “Bleak” live a few years back.

-VN