Sigh - Scenes From Hell
By: Ken Brzezinski
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Tuesday December 08, 2009
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Where’s my bag of “I Told You So”? When I was given the task of reviewing the album Scenes From Hell from Japanese band Sigh, I had a feeling I knew what I was in for when I read the song titles. Now, granted, the only other Japanese rock band I had been exposed to was Loudness, and they are just some hair metal band. But when I was going through the song titles and such for Sigh, I had a feeling I was in for a dose of schlock metal, and sadly, that’s what I got.
Be it by nature or nurture, this album sounds like pretty much every other death metal album I have ever heard. And the same thing crossed my mind when I heard the first song “Prelude To The Oracle” as when I heard my first Cradle of Filth song, “this music is really awesome, but why do the vocals have to suck so bad?” If you’ve said that or thought that, there is probably no way in hell you are going to like this album. There is, however, one redeeming quality to the album. It is, of course, the music.
But I’m not just talking about the blatantly brutal blast beats (say that 5 times fast) of Junichi Harashima. I’m not just talking about the great furious riffs and the piercing solos of Shinichi Ishikawa. No, there is actually some great instrumentation on the album, and it’s on par feel wise, with anything that’s been written since I’ve been alive.
Trumpets, saxophone, violins, and all sorts of classical instruments are all over this album, and are used not as an afterthought, but used to accent the power of the music that’s already there. Take, for instance, the brass section in the opening track, “Prelude To The Oracle”. As if the scary ass vocals weren’t, the brass goes on a great fast run of notes that create a feeling of uneasiness and tension. And that is hard to do when a song is moving at 500mph, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t do it, with HORNS no less!
The same kind of thing happens in “The Red Funeral”. Only this time, there is a whole breakdown associated with it. And instead of just horns, there is a whole cavalcade of instrumentation. The horns have a slight ska feel to them, but that could be just because my ears pretty much only associate horns with rock in the ska genre. However it works. There is also a…”Peter And The Wolf” kind of vibe to it? I don’t know if anyone gets the reference. But basically there are interpretations of that classic story done only with music. In the music, each instrument is the voice of a certain character, and the story is told through musical storytelling as opposed to words. It really is quite amazing to hear, but it’s even more amazing that a band like this has incorporated it into death metal.
That being said, this album really doesn’t have a lot of re-listen value for me. It delivers musically, I guess, but the completely unintelligible vocals are too hard for me to get past. I don’t know if that would have made much a difference anyway because I don’t really think this is music you listen to every day unless you can’t live without it. It’s a bit too cerebral and complex in terms of song structure for one to just sit back and enjoy like a Bob Seger song.
