Okay, I Think I Understand the Progress of Sigh’s Music

Not including all the random demos and EPs, I believe it goes something like this (also, yes, there’s a point to this.):

Sigh formed in the *very* early 90s, at the time when black metal was first coming into existence. Really, they should be considered a “second wave” band along with all the other ones that always get listed, but they probably weren’t very influential, seeing as they came from Japan.

Their first album, Scorn Defeat, was put out on the label made by Euronymous of Mayhem in 1993, shortly after Euronymous was killed by Varg Vikerns of Burzum. The album is pretty much what you expect from any early black metal album - low production quality, growling vocals, and a lot of grimness and evil. That said, I like it more than most of the old-school black metal that I’ve heard, adding to my theory that for every genre I don’t really care for, there’s a Japanese band that I love from it. 

Their second album was 1995’s Infidel Art, which is largely the same kind of black metal, but now with symphonic elements and some backing vocal chants and such (so, symphonic black metal). 

1997’s Hail Horror Hail was the first album to start deviating a little bit from black metal convention, generally by being a bit more energetic and fun, with guitar solos that you don’t expect to find in black metal. 

Scenario IV: Dead Dreams in 1999 finally comes to being considerably avant-garde, with lots of weird elements coming into the mix and a bit more fun being there, but the black metal roots still are very apparent.

Then all the shit hits the fan with Imaginary Sonicscape in 2001, which is avant-garde metal that only really gets contextualized as anything relating to black metal when you know that the band used to play it. Tonally and structurally it’s all over the place and nothing like black metal, and it’s one of the most fun albums I’ve ever heard.

Then there’s 2005’s Gallows Gallery which is perhaps the most confusing Sigh release. For one thing, on this album and this album only, clean vocals are used instead of growls, but it’s really weird-sounding singing that often features random multi-track vocals that sound very unsettling. The production quality isn’t as good as it was on Imaginary Sonicscape, and while their sound is still very much avant-garde, the song structures become a lot more consistent. And what’s more, it sounds more like 80s metal, reminding me in particular of King Diamond.

Next up, 2007’s Hangman’s Hymn continues to have the lower-quality production, but the sound completely changes again, and seems to revert back to what it was on the earlier albums like Infidel Art. It’s very heavy black metal with a visceral sound and little of the avant-garde from the past few albums. And the growling vocals come back in full force. 

And finally, this year we have Scenes From Hell, which has even lower sound-quality than the past two albums, and sounds even more like their early stuff. The songs are straight-up symphonic black metal. It’s very good symphonic black metal, but it can’t really be called avant-garde at all. 

If you break it down like this it all makes sense - the Sigh sound is cyclical. After all, the album titles (including the Ghastly Funeral Theater EP before Hail Horror Hail) continually spell SIGH with their first letters. The naming cycle is on it’s third go-round. I can’t help but wonder - were the first four a progression from black metal to avant-garde, and then the next four a progression from avant-garde back to black metal? And will the cycle continue? We’ll only know when the next I-starting title from the band comes out. 

Even more shocking would be if they planned this out from the start, or at least early on. That would be some shit.