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intothewellsabyss
Nov 16, 20224 min read

Sigh (サイ) - 絶望を受け継ぐもの (Heir to Despair) (2018)

FROM THE CRYPTS - CELEBRATING PAST ALBUM RELEASES in the HISTORY of HARD ROCK & HEAVY METAL…



On November 16, 2018, Japanese Avant-garde Black Metallers Sigh (サイ) released their eleventh full-length studio album 絶望を受け継ぐもの (Heir to Despair) via Candlelight Records in the US.



Background:

While the previous album Graveward (2015) was rather symphonic orchestral stuff, Heir to Despair is pointing at the completely opposite direction. Produced by Sigh, the album was recorded at Studio Moopies & Electric Space Studio. It was mixed at Powersound Studio with mastering handled at Maor Appelbaum Mastering in California, USA.



Heavily inspired by old, crazy Progressive bands like Brainticket, Embryo, Agitation Free, Between, Gentle Giant, Os Mutantes, Modulo 1000, Black Widow, etc., Heir to Despair sees the Black Metal stalwarts explore madness through folklore, while experimenting with new sounds, filled with vintage keyboards and flute. Heir to Despair is a truly heavy, exotic and psychedelic album. The album was noted for its incorporation of instruments and compositional styles from traditional Japanese music. Band leader Mirai Kawashima learned to play flute for this album, while the album also incorporates Middle Eastern and Central Asian sounds.



Critical Reception:

In a review for PopMatters, Antonio Poscic wrote of Heir to Despair;

“In the late ’80s, Japan’s Sigh were known as a curious aberration, one of only a handful of bands outside of Scandinavia to have partaken in Black Metal’s second wave. Yet, despite their historic significance, Sigh never felt as if really belonging to that scene. Inhabiting a bubble of their own and uninhibited by expectations, Mirai Kawashima and his cohorts toyed with Black Metal’s symbolism and genre markers, meshed them with a cornucopia of elements from outside the genre, and created their own mangled stream of consciousness.
Sigh’s reliance on this approach meant that the band’s style became impossible to pinpoint. It meandered between eclectic takes on Avant-garde Metal, stumbled through trippy Electronica and Progressive Rock laced experiments, and ultimately found itself closest to Black Metal on 2012’s In Somniphobia, a deranged symphonic mayhem and arguably the group’s most accomplished release. After “In Somniphobia‘s” similar and oddly consistent follow-up Graveward, Sigh’s 11th full-length Heir to Despair finds them absorbing new genres and redefining their approach once more. On it, they hone a sound that is comparatively bare and closer to Metal basics, sprinkled with repurposed style lines touched in the past, but also for the first time heavily influenced by Japanese folklore and music.
Rather than reflecting on Heir to Despair through the prism of what came before it, the record is best experienced on its own. In Kawashima’s words, “it’s a stylistically diverse exploration of madness, but one that doesn’t translate into chaotic and bombastically delirious music”. Instead, it thrives on evoking a more unnerving and subtle kind of fright imbued with psychedelia and a sense of dread that has more in common with psychological horror than gore and slasher films. The everpresent hypnagogic delirium that creeps in the corners of Kubrick’s The Shining similarly lingers in Heir to Despair‘s”every note and progression. Even the album’s cover—Eliran Kantor’s deceptively simple and clean portrait in a reimagined ukiyo-e style—hides in plain sight the lunacy of its subject that waters dead flowers while a threatening, demented smile flashes across her face.
This sort of elusive and illusive dichotomy infects the music and creates a duality in the material’s flow. The introductory Aletheia, for example, opens as an oriental-sounding mid-paced cut lead by shamisen and sitar strums and light percussive touches only to be kickstarted by Sigh’s trademark, fuzzy guitar leads. Krautrock rhythms, Black Metal tremolos, ’70s Prog Rock ornaments, and psychedelia all intertwine as vocoder and raspy vocal incantations clash in a mixture of Japanese and English lyrics. While the addition of sparkly folk ornaments makes the song appear complex, its underlying structure is beautifully simple and broken only by a scratchy epilogue complete with haunted electronic effects.
But beyond Aletheia, the album feels consciously disjointed and fragmented, as if its story is not meant to be followed linearly. The segue from Aletheia into the faster and straightforward Homo Homini Lupus is strange and abrupt, while the following two standout tracks—the infectious theremin and groove-laden Hunters Not Horned and the ferocious, galloping In Memories Delusional—appear to stand on their own, disconnected from what came before them and from what’s ahead.
And what follows In Memories Delusional is Sigh’s darker and more convoluted side encapsulated in the central Heresy trilogy. Moving from a dubby, glitchy, electronic torrent of sounds on Heresy I: Oblivium, Sigh dissipate into short fragments dominated by distorted vocals akin to the Residents’ avant-pop on Heresy II: Acosmism and achieve a Lynchian climax reminiscent of Disco Volante-era Mr. Bungle on Heresy III: Sub Specie Aeternitatis. The band confidently glides through these cuts grasping for flourishes of prog rock, trip-hop, synthpop, and neo-psychedelia. It’s a cohesive array of sounds despite the almost absurd mashup of tropes. Yet when the trilogy ends, there’s another abrupt jump. Hands of the String Puller is a welcome scorcher with frolicky flutes, but it breaks the flow before the epic ten-minute title track closes the album and marks another peak. Heir to Despair is both a fusion and counterpoint of what came before it, a sort of a companion piece to the Heresy trilogy and a distillation of the preceding tunes.
In a discography full of records that sound unmistakably like Sigh despite often not sounding anything like each other, Heir to Despair fits in perfectly. The instantly recognizable riffs, inspired songwriting bits, a production that is just a bit muffled and just a little bit off, the passages of Black Metal aggression, and a general feel of insane joy are all still here and should delight fans.
Simultaneously, because of its structural simplicity, Heir to Despair might be Sigh’s most approachable record, one that doesn’t attack the listener but instead develops its demented ways insidiously. Whichever way you choose to see it, it is an accomplishment.”

Note: The reviews shared here are for historical reference. The views and opinions expressed within are not always supported (in full or in part) by Into the Wells. — E.N. Wells



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