I’ve Been Sleeping on Sigh
I’ve been sleeping on Sigh, and “Goh-ka” just woke me all the way up. One pass through the album trailer and I’m already checking whether I can get to a show.
Sigh announced their new album “Goh-ka” for September 4th on Peaceville Records, eleven tracks and close to an hour long. The guest list is where it got me: Frédéric Leclercq (Kreator, DragonForce) on bass, Mike Heller (Fear Factory) on drums, and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth turning in a guest guitar solo on “Unputenpu.” Åkerfeldt isn’t singing a note here. He’s playing, and that matters.
People spend so much time on Åkerfeldt’s voice, that clean-to-growl range everybody quotes, that they forget the guy is a genuinely great guitar player. Handing him a Sigh track as a soloist instead of a vocalist is the kind of move that tells you the band knows exactly what they have. I want to hear him in that context, on someone else’s song, fitting into a world that isn’t his own.
And it is some world. Everybody files Sigh under “avant-garde black metal” and calls it a day, but that label barely covers it. This is Celtic Frost and Voivod and Black Sabbath thrown in a pot with horror soundtracks, Japanese instrumentation, psychedelic rock and classical, with progressive death metal running underneath all of it. The title carries three meanings at once: infernal fire, the fire that ends the world, and karma. Nobody else is building records like this, and they have been doing it since the early ’90s while I somehow wasn’t paying attention.
Thirty-some years in and Sigh sound this restless. Go watch the trailer. If it hits you the way it hit me, I might see you at the show.
Source: Peaceville Records