ALBUM REVIEW: Heir to Despair – Sigh

Japan’s SIGH are one of the black metal bands who have not only laid down the sound that would define the scene over the decades, but continued to expand it and take it to its sonic limits. Over the course of their last ten records, they have blended black metal with pretty much every form of music, something that has managed to work incredibly well every single time. With their eleventh album, Heir to Despair, the band once again does an excellent job of producing an album that is both brilliant and bizarre.

Alethia starts this album off on a very strong, demented note. With a great, dancing opening guitar line, and a section that sounds like a sitar, this song has a great sound, and it has a lot of cool middle eastern melodies, heavily distorted vocals, and some flute passages that complement the sound of the guitars perfectly. It’s a very mid-paced affair, full of eclectic and interesting motifs that help to keep the music engrossing throughout. There’s plenty of electronic flourishes peppered throughout this track, which helps to add another element to the sound and provide a few hooks of their own. In it’s final minute, this song becomes well and truly demented, descending into a dark and cacophonous wall of noise with hellish shrieks, jarring guitars and some virtuosic piano accompaniments. It’s a great way to start this album off on the right note.

Homo Homini Lupus has a more solid melodic death metal influence, with some impressive, imaginative lead guitar parts and catchy, instantly memorable vocals, which range from rabid, bestial roars to sweet, soaring clean passages. There’s some really solid, tight rhythms and, as the song enters its second half, some great keyboard sections that have a great, hammond organ-esque sound to them. This is a song that shows that, despite SIGH‘s reputation for producing bizarre and unique music, they are still able to create a great, catchy song that sticks in the listeners head immediately. Hunters Not Horned, with its robust guitars, drums and bass lines, starts to introduce a little bit of psychedelia to proceedings, with some ghoulish keyboards and a great, sparsely used flutes adding plenty of musical depth to the proceedings. As the song begins to shift into a more ambient noise direction, powerful percussions, discordant guitars and equally diverse keyboards take the song down a much weirder and more varied path, with the band make great use of guitar distortion to add to the frenetic and dissonant sound that has taken over the song.

In Memories Delusional is a speed driven track with tight, chaotic musicianship with a lot of brilliant melodic parts in amongst the jarring and frenzied side of the music. With vocals ranging from dense, vicious gutturals through to cleaner sections that still possess an eerie quality to them, this is again a very eclectic offering that shows the SIGH‘s far more rabid and experimental side, with no one motif sticking around for longer than is needed before heading onto the next one. its final, keyboard driven moments provide a vast, bombastic edge to the song, which works incredibly well and brings this song to a close on a great note. In this way, it’s ends up being one of the more expansive and avant garde piece of music on this record up to this point.

Heresy (Part 1: Oblivium) marks not only the first in a trilogy of songs, but also the point on the album where the band well and truly dives headlong into the more progressive kind of sound that they are known for. The music is, initially, based more around a solid, synchopated drum beat, impenetrable, ambient noise and a few, very sparsely used saxophone note. The song quickly takes up a solid, electronic sound, with even the guitars and keyboards being drenched in so much distortion that they have a mechanical and processed sound to them. This soon changes as the song enters its second half, with the music taking on a lighter, more symphonic tone, with powerful, glorious keyboards and dancing flute passages being complemented with some cleaner guitar hooks and some well placed vocals, all of which remove much of the tension of foreboding from the song, before the oppressive industrial motifs begin to take centre stage once again. The song closes with yet another symphonic keyboard composition, which adds a grand note to the final moments of this song. Heresy (Part 2: Acosmism), with its bizarre, heavily distorted vocals and measured, minimalist keyboard flourishes, is even weirder and imbued with more lunacy than its predecessor. It quickly dives into a truly dark, frightening section that is made up of thick, cacophonous noise, a free form saxophone solo and the sounds of women and babies screaming. It’s a short, sharp shock of a song that, despite lasting less than two minutes, is genuinely uncomfortable to listen to at points.

Heresy (Part 3: Sub Species Aeternitatis), the third and final part of this trilogy, is again a brief track that manages to make it for its lack of running time by being absolutely insane. With some crazy sounding, cacophonous noise, underpinned by piano and vocal accompaniments, it sound much lighter and even slightly uplifting compared with the song that came before it, but the grating, domineering noise that is an almost constant in this song, plus the songs closing moments, which sees the music shift between one instrument and another with ridiculous speed, ensures that this song it still an incredibly unsettling listen.

The album’s penultimate offering, Hands of the String Puller, is a great track, with lot of solid thrash metal riffs, epic keyboard sections and some great, almost celtic folk sounding flutes, all creating a great track that backs up some truly fierce and aggressive vocals, which contrast a quite well with the generally sharp, glorious tone of the music. There’s plenty of great melodicism that makes this a welcome return to (relative) normalcy after the last three tracks. There’s still plenty of off kilter, avant garde moments here, but when compared the what came before it, it’s a far more straight forward, catchy track. The final, titular song, Heir to Despair, manages to bring together the craziness of SIGH and their tighter, more melody tinged side with great effect. This track features some of the most impressive guitar work on the whole record, and it really illustrates the high level of musicianship on offer. There’s plenty of awesome keyboard compositions, with a notable influence from middle eastern music returning to the sound and providing an exotic edge to the music. It ebbs and flows between visceral metal riffs and more subdued, atmosphere orientated pieces that help to provide a break from the more brutal aspects of this song, whilst giving the experimental side of the band’s sound come to the fore. At points, the music feels like a demented waltz, with an energetic, dancing keyboard lick that it’s hard not to love taking center stage, with the rest of the music built around it and helping to beef up the already vast and substantial sound. After a long and brilliant musical journey, the track comes to a close on a wave of nauseating, palpable ambience, which gradually fades away and brings the record to its conclusion.

Heir To Despair is an amazing record that is catchy, eclectic and, at points, insane. If you are looking for the sort of wacky experimentation that characterised albums like Imaginary Sonicscape or Infidel Art, then you might be disappointed, because what’s on offer here is far more restrained than on many of their previous albums, although there’s still plenty of avant garde elements in their to keep you satisfied. This is, above all, very melodic and tight from the first track to the last. There’s no doubt that SIGH are still able to produce some of the most eclectic, bizarre and experimental music you’re likely to hear, and there’s absolutely no doubt that this band are not running out of ideas any time soon.

Rating: 8/10

Heir To Despair is out now via Candlelight Records.

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