Mercyful Fate played MGM Music Hall – 11/13

King Diamond and company came to Landsdowne Street with support from Kreator and Midnight.

There are many ways to break in a new venue, but can you really say you’ve covered all the bases before a Dane in full corpse paint has taken the stage to wail about Satan in a paint-peeling falsetto?

Fenway’s MGM Music Hall crossed that one off the list Sunday night, as black metal progenitors Mercyful Fate came to town on their first U.S. tour in over 20 years. The band made its North American return over the summer with a one-off at Psycho Las Vegas, but made a full production of it this fall with a tour featuring support from old friends and new.

Cleveland’s Midnight hit the stage first, their intent fixed squarely on masked mayhem and sleazy speed metal pummeling. The trio played hard and fast, and apart from a brief stage crashing by a mostly-nude dancer, eschewed stage production of any kind. If you didn’t know any better, it wouldn’t seem inconceivable that they’d broken into the venue, stolen some gear from back stage and banged out a guerilla set before anybody caught wise.

German thrash veterans Kreator took the opposite tack, their followup set preceded by an almost comically drawn-out process of stage hands affixing fake corpses to nooses and pikes to enshrine the performance. The band – who are one of classic thrash’s most vicious for my money – sounded appropriately battle-ready in a 10-song survey of their lengthy career. Frontman Mille Petrozza leaned in (a little too far in, maybe) to egging on call-and-responses, walls of death and circle pits from the crowd, but the inhabitants of the GA floor hardly needed the encouragement to cheerfully brutalize one another in a pit that I later heard compared (favorably) to a war zone.

Ahead of their headlining set – the band’s first in Boston since the mid-90s – Mercyful Fate stoked the anticipation by shrouding their own elaborate stage setup with an enormous black curtain bearing their name. When it dropped, we were in the King’s domain: a torch-lit dungeon with a Baphomet altar under the sign of an inverted neon cross. You know, the usual stuff.

The band soon kicked off a lean set of their devilish heavy metal classics with “The Oath,” something of a statement of purpose for a group who one-upped contemporaries that flirted with Satanic imagery by embracing it wholeheartedly. If not many elements of their old-school sound trickled down to the early waves of black metal, their aesthetic certainly did. But where that scene would soon lean into its grim, wind-whipped nihilism, Mercyful Fate made big, fun, prog-y songs that unapologetically rocked. And that’s precisely what they did for the next 90 minutes at MGM.

The band’s current lineup centers on founders King Diamond and guitarist Hank Shermann, joined by 90s era members in drummer Bjarne T. Holm and axeman Mike Wead, plus new addition touring bassist Becky Baldwin. Regardless of any one member’s tenure, the whole quintet sounded totally locked in on a setlist pulled mainly from the band’s 1980s run (save for a single new song, the atmospheric “The Jackal of Salzburg.”) “Curse of the Pharaohs,” “Melissa” and the multi-part epic encore of “Satan’s Fall” all sounded as dynamic and headbanging as you’d hope. Diamond, outfitted in his signature face paint and rocking some alternating headpieces, played ringleader throughout with his ghoulish stage presence and the undiminished power of that piercing voice.

There could be no half measures in bringing back a band like Mercyful Fate, so over the top in both sound and style that anything less than total commitment would be a grave disappointment. Thankfully, the band’s latest resurrection is anything but, and Sunday night’s show was a theatrical thrill that proved why they’re one of the all-time greats.

Scroll below for a whole bunch of photos from the night.