Imperial Trimphant - Alphaville

Oh god I'm getting old
 

Imperial Triumphant is one of those hot new properties that has taken the music snob world by storm, and it's easy to see why.  This is utterly whacked out, high concept avant garde madness.  Their aesthetic is not only incredible and unique (a type of art deco/retrofuturist pastiche with an undercurrent of decay seeping through every jagged angle) but it perfectly complements their overarching theme of high society elites being not-so-secretly baby eating monsters.  This discordant juxtaposition between the callous sociopathy of the upper class and the mud-caked destitution of the lower class is flawlessly executed in the way the music itself works as well, with dissonant jangleblack, amelodic walking basslines, and utterly chaotic percussion clashing against big band brass, barbershop quartets, and tribal hand drums.  The entire experience is fractured and disorienting in a way that feels entirely intentional.  It's rare you get a metal album so unafraid to step outside the boundaries of what metal is "supposed" to be (something I wish more bands explored) and to hear a concept so seamlessly intertwined with the music itself.  You don't need to read anything that spells it out for you to understand it, the industrial clangs and high-falutin' phoniness of the glitzy elements are so square-peg-round-hole against the cyclonic whirlwind of the dominant metal sections that it's obvious on its own.

The problem with all of this is that it sucks.  It's... it's so, so unbearable to listen to, holy shit.

In Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk, he tells a story wherein he is desperately trying to replicate Monk's unique style of jazz piano, complete with weird off-time clunks and blangs (he wasn't nicknamed "Melodious Thunk" without reason) and no matter how hard he tried he simply couldn't get the sound right.  It became clear to him why when he had a dream where he was struggling during practice before Monk himself approached him and said "You're making the wrong mistakes."

That quote never left my mind throughout the entirety of Alphaville.  Imperial Triumphant is so clearly doing everything in their power to create a disorienting soundscape of jazzy avant garde black metal and despite doing seemingly everything correctly, making all the fucked up noises in all the spots you might expect, it still sounds like they're screwing up in all the wrong places and wind up creating a discordant nightmare that physically hurts to listen to despite their intention being executed perfectly.  The climax of "City Swine" sounds exactly like what I'd expect metalheads who completely misunderstood Monk to sound like; a hellish whirlwind of amelodic piano smashes against seemingly free time blast beats an atonal bass runs.  It conceptually showcases why the planet-sized thumb of class inequality absolutely sucks to live under when you're not on top, but in doing so they wind up creating music that... well, absolutely sucks.  Monk is also the originator of the famous quote about jazz being just as much about the notes you aren't playing as the notes that you are, and Imperial Triumphant apparently threw this piece of advice straight the fuck out the window because they play every single note in existence at every second.  The value of silence seems to be approached during more introspective moments like the bass and snare outro of "Atomic Age" that leads into the solo piano intro of "Transmission to Mercury" but it comes at the tail end of eight excruciating minutes of indecipherable nonsense.  The off-puttingly weird quiet moments actually work pretty well, all told, but they're bookended by unlistenable bullshit.  "Transmission to Mercury" is one of the standouts purely because that smooth intro goes on for so long and gives the most welcome reprieve from the eyeball-spinning cacophony that populates the rest of the record.

I gave extremely high marks last year to White Ward's sophomore album, Love Exchange Failure, particularly because I thought the smooth saxophone melodies didn't add a new dimension to atmoblack as much as it filled a space that I didn't realize was empty before.  Alphaville does the exact opposite thing by cluttering every space with so many 2smart4u elephant noises, rattling clangs, and screeches that it makes me beg for sweet release the longer it goes on.  Each new track introduces a new sonic element that intentionally clashes against what the band was doing ten seconds before, which in itself was already a cacophonous mess.  It's the musical equivalent to letting a six year old choose toppings for a sundae.  The title track is basically the only piece on the whole album where it manages to go a solid five minutes or so where the concept is executed in a way that doesn't sound like a kid fucking around in Guitar Pro, and that's with the caveat that once those five minutes are up it goes right back into sounding like a shootout in a music store.

Maybe all of this sounds great to you, and that's fine.  This is certainly tailor made to appeal to flannel-clad /mu/people, bearded pipesmoking hipsters, and hygiene-deficient avant garde unmusic fans to jerk themselves off around while normies like me grimace and stick my fingers in my ears, and there's nothing inherently wrong with being those things (but please, take a shower).  But something like Liturgy breaks all of metal's rules while creating something that resonates emotionally, blending incoherent, pretentious philosophical sophistry with music that punches you directly in the heart and forces you to reassess what black metal is even supposed to be.  Imperial Triumphant breaks all of metal's rules while creating something that sounds like flailing children who have no fucking idea what they're doing.  Alphaville is the high budget version of "terrible on purpose" and I didn't enjoy one single second of this disaster.  Maybe I'm missing the point or it simply isn't for me, but that doesn't prevent me from hearing a discordant hellsong like "Excelsior" and considering picking up smoking again just so I can die slightly sooner.

RATING: 0%

Necronomidol - VOIDHYMN

Well the cover art is incredible

Well... this is a weird one.  Necronomidol is one of the many groups inspired by the meteoric success of Babymetal, blending the idol culture of J-pop with heavy metal in some form.  Babymetal took the easy route and blended it with already poppy forms of melodeath and such, but Necronomidol take a much more avant-garde approach to the idea.  The actual songwriting was handled by three different people, two dudes who are apparently fairly well known in the extreme weird subcircles of the Japanese underground, and... Dan Terminus?  Yeah, the really loud synthwave guy with the super colorful album covers like Automated Refrains.  So yeah, this is going to be a weird one.

And honestly, the biggest flaw here is that it isn't weird enough.  Taking a traditional five-member J-pop girl group and throwing them in a hellish void of strange extremity seems like it should be a home run based on novelty alone, but VOIDHYMN (actually their third album, which is strange because when researching the band I discovered that they're apparently a Big Fucking Deal in the idol scene but I'd never heard of them prior to this promo spawning in my inbox like a fucking SCP) only goes full out with it a few times.  I think part of the problem is simply that I'm the wrong audience for this, because as a general rule I don't really care for aesthetics and performance outside of recorded material, and considering the genre this spawned from, that's where most of the effort goes.  Their elaborate outfits, stage shows, music videos, and inherent celebrity status in their home country is where most of their appeal lies, and none of that shit matters to me.  I'm a stupid headbanger, I like big dumb riffs, I don't care how subversive it is for these five sex symbols to dress in bondage and sing about cosmic horror.  Unless you're GWAR or something I'm really just not gonna care.

So with that in mind, the music is depressingly average for the idea.  On paper, this should've been straight fuckin' wacky, but in reality it's just kind of meandering and all the best songs are the least weird ones.  "Dawnslayer" and "Strange Aeons" are just straight ahead animu metal that would be right at home as stage music for BlazBlue, and those songs rule.  "Dawnslayer" in particular rips the opening melody from Dragonforce's "Fury of the Storm" and it's so brazen and fun that I don't even care.  Power metal is clearly the subgenre that the whole conceit of mixing metal with idol culture that fits the most naturally, so it's no surprise that those two songs stand out as among the most well written.  The more overtly poppy tracks like "Kadath" and "Skulls in the Stars" are also a perfect fit, with the latter of which being literally the only time throughout all ten tracks that I can differentiate the different voices of the five different singers.  Generally they just sound like one girl harmonizing with herself, so it's disappointing that they don't do more with the variety presented to them, but this seems to be a common trope in the genre so I'll just write it off as a cliche they're kinda bound to.

The problem arises with the weird songs themselves just being kinda bland.  It's really obvious which songs Dan Terminus worked on, because "In Black" and "Innsmouth" throw the thumping synthwave influence to the forefront, but they wind up being the most boring tracks on the album because they're not even as extreme as his solo work.  The Wrath of Code is total sensory overload, "Innsmouth" is just a dark, vaguely poppy song with heavy synths.  "Samhain" takes a weirdly ska approach with the jaunty upstrokes taking the brunt of the song's impact.  The only two songs that really take the idea of "avant-garde black metal J-girl idolpop" to its logical extreme are "Thanatogenesis" and "Psychopomp".  The latter takes the creepy staccato vocals from "In Black" and puts them over churning mid-paced black metal riffs and then switches it for dark acoustic stuff every once and a while and just grinds on for way too long.  "Thanatogenesis" on the other hand is everything I wanted this album to be.  This is the one time they fully took advantage of the idea, because this is weird and chaotic with regards to the music itself.  The riffs are nasty and venomous and the drumming is a cacophonous avalanche of blast beats and off-time jazzy fills, and it's all happening underneath these very soothing vocals that fly over the top, completely disconnected from what's going on with the music.  This is fucking awesome.  This discordant, Deathspell Omega style dissonant chaos laying the foundation for incongruently saccharine sweetness from an offputtingly innocent voice is exactly the kind of thing that VOIDHYMN needs more of.  It sounds like a sweet apparition gently guiding you into a swirling maelstrom of hellfire and cosmic unspeakableness and I love it.  If every song was as good as "Thanatogenesis" this would be an easy top five contender on the year, I'm dead serious.

But unfortunately, every song isn't as good.  Most of the weird songs are just dull and unexciting while the more normal poppy and/or shreddy power metal songs are very solid.  There's only one track that truly breaks the mold and that's basically the glorious fluke that should've been the basis for the entire album.  Overall, I do like this, but I wish it was bolder in its experimentation, because there's a lot of potential left on the table here.  This starts off promising and just gets less and less weird as it goes on, eventually ending on a few decent poppy J-rock tracks that all but leave the uncomfortable darkness behind.  Maybe the lyrics keep things creepy and unsettling, but I have no way of knowing since the only Japanese I can speak is in the form of Gargoyle album titles.

And I need to reiterate how fucking awesome the cover art is.  I want a giant flag with that art covering an entire wall in my bedroom.


RATING: 71%

Slipknot - Iowa

The most important avant-garde death metal album ever

You're gonna think I'm crazy, but hear me out when I say this: Slipknot's second album, Iowa, is a fucking masterpiece of avant-garde death metal.  We metal fans, as a fandom, owe the existence of bands like Portal, Ulcerate, Deathspell Omega, and pretty much any band who has decided to buck convention and take a path of twisted morbidity over the beaten path over the past decade or so to Slipknot.  Everything music was, Slipknot wasn't.  They dared to take the harsh tones of Morbid Angel and the groove of Bolt Thrower, blended with the harsh groove of Jungle Rot, slather it with a prominent and important aesthetic (not unlike so many pioneers of black metal like Mayhem and Dartkthrone), an outlook of sheer nihilism and a creative use of percussion, and just put it all together with a craftmanship yet unseen.

I mean really, think about it.  This gets pegged as yet another casualty of nu metal all the time, but how many nu metal bands sounded even remotely like Slipknot?  Even on their first album, the Stainds and Mudvaynes and Linkin Parks and Alien Ant Farms and Papa Roachs and yadda yakkity yoo of the world were sonically worlds apart from the ground Slipknot was treading.  They were heavier than anybody in the mainstream at the time, and they used that visibility to push the envelope straight over the edge of the cliff.  I mean really, how many platinum selling, grammy winning albums can you name that start off with a cacophony of blast beats and incomprehensible screaming like the beginning of "People = Shit"?  Everything about this just screams "We will not conform, we will not be consonant or pleasurable.  We are here to sonically decimate your eardrums and you will all buy it and enjoy it like good little maggots".  This is abrasive and confrontational to the point of utter genius, while at the same time retaining a powerful groove that entrenches every last note into your memory, burrowing into your consciousness like a cerebral bore, fragmenting everything you thought you understood about music into a morass of negativity and hatred.

All nine members of the band are fully utilized, with there being creative and well-placed turntable scratches and samples all over the place in tandem with the creative rhythm section.  The drum production is over the top and nothing short of genius.  The snare has a really sharp *pop* to it and it just stands as a metaphorical razor piercing the band's musical skin as often as possible, much like the mentality the band was surely going through at the time. Tensions between members were very high at the time, and it shows in how dark, abrasive, and nihilistic the entire ordeal is.  Listen to something like "Disasterpiece" or "Heretic Anthem" and try to tell me that that isn't pure, genuine hatred spewing out of Corey Taylor's mouth like a bile hydrant.  So much of the album's runtime is spent barreling through droves of nihilistic fervor, beating down every living being in your way, slitting throats and fucking wounds.  Not only is this far, far too antagonistic for logical mainstream radio play (even in 2001, arguably the height of nu metal's popularity), but it's just simply too heavy, too out there, and too bleak to be called anything other than "avant-garde death metal".  And I'm sticking to that claim.  Not only is Iowa precisely that, but it's also the best album the genre has ever seen.

I mean really, what other metal band at the time could so brazenly pummel listeners with clearly Sandoval-inspired drumming while at the same time maintaining scalpel-sharp hooks and then throwing in the occasional knee buckling curveball like "Gently", "Skin Ticket", and "Iowa".  Those three songs lend the most credence to my claim of avant-garde death metal.  Would a band that was allegedly so mainstream and kid-friendly really throw in not one, not two, but a whopping three extended, atmospheric tracks that focus on an oppressive, suffocating aura like that?  Those tracks, most especially the title track, are some of the least accessible things I've ever heard.  Rumor has it that while recording the vocals for that track, Corey was curled up on the floor of the studio, naked, cutting and vomiting on himself in order to get the proper amount of anguish for his part.  Really, that's fucking dedication, and the result is more than worth it.  You know how much I adore In Somniphobia by Sigh for being such a brilliant representation of insanity during a man's last moments?  "Iowa" is exactly that, but eleven years earlier.  I can't praise it enough, it's the band tearing down the walls of convention and taking a big smelly shit on people's expectations.  How can fans of metal, fans of spectacle, fans of anything not adore this?

I can point to any song to make my point.  Iowa has a little bit of everything. Catchy hooks in "Left Behind", blistering extremity in "People = Shit", powerful grooves in "New Abortion", skull squeezing heaviness and heart melting insanity in "Iowa".  Just... everything they do strikes bullseye, and Celtic Frost's resurgence owes everything to this album.  Take the best parts of War Master, Altars of Madness, Music for a Slaughtering Tribe, and pretty much everything else that fucked a boundary with an iron spike, and you'll end up with this, the album responsible for Monotheist, Hangman's Hymn, In a Flesh Aquarium, Eparistera Daimones, Miss Machine, and countless others.  It's hard to go on at length about why the popular opinion on this album and band within the metal scene is so unbelievably fucknuts wrong, so all I can really do is hope you take my word for it.  Listen again, listen for the subtleties, the variety, the bravery, hooks, aggression, nihilism, everything.  Throw your preconceived notions out the window and let Iowa sweep you away into the land of one of the most influential death metal albums of all time.

I'm not joking, don't be a fool.


RATING: 100%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol III: Gorguts - Obscura

 I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...

For real, Obscura is the album that inspired this entire series in the first place.  The reason for this is simple; as far as I've been able to tell, there is no other album in all of heavy metal that is both as well loved by the fandom and also as intensely reviled by me.  I can understand near-universal worship of bands and albums I dislike most of the time, I really can.  Hell, I rag on Helloween's most notable work all the time, but I know why people like it.  I understand how and why it was so influential, even to bands that I enjoy.  I get it, I really do.  But for the life of me, Obscura still eludes me.  What the fuck is it that makes this so goddamn revered?  I really can't wrap my head around it.  The only way I can rationalize it is by viewing it from the "I love weird things for the sake of weird things" crowd, but even then I still see this hailed by both old school death metal fanatics and snobby prog fans alike.  Something about Gorguts's third album brings everybody together, and I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've spent roughly eight years listening to this album on and off trying to make sense of it all, and I just cannot for the life of me understand the appeal in this sonic trainwreck. 

Some people are just suckers for dissonance, I can get that, it's why shit like Portal and Ulcerate are so popular in the underground.  Hell, I'm a huge fan of SikTh and they're pretty notorious for sounding terrible on purpose since the guitarists don't know a lick of music theory and just kind of play whatever.  But Gorguts here manages to be dissonant 100% of the time, there isn't one consonant chord or melody throughout the entire bloated runtime of Obscura.  I'm as serious as a goddamned heart attack right now, for real.  This manages to run over an hour without anything pleasing to the ear happening.

But BH!  It's death metal!  You can't expect death metal to be pleasing to the ear!  I bet you're an In Flames fan!

Clearly I mean pleasing in a death metal sense.  I like listening to Cannibal Corpse, I enjoy rocking out to Immolation, I could spin the first Krisiun album day and night, I have honestly nearly shat my pants during "Suspended in Tribulation" during a Suffocation show, I enjoy all of these classic bands not because they're melodic or pleasant, but because they don't sound like they just picked up their instruments for the first time the day prior to entering the studio.  I don't give a fuck how "creative" or "avant garde" or "outside the box" this album is, the bottom line is that the opening riff to the title track sounds fucking terrible.  That's not even first year guitar player level of skill, that's not even first day.  That is somebody picking up their buddy's guitar when he leaves the room for a second and just wailing away on it without having a clue what he's doing.  Every last riff sounds like this, they all sound like dissonant smashing and random bends with no real thought put behind them other than "Does this sound like shit?  Yeah?  Perfect!".  The percussion section is equally nonsensical; complementing nothing by blasting at seemingly inopportune times, goofing around with bizarre jazz sensibilites, and just seemingly playing the entire album as a free time jazz exercise as opposed to anything even remotely structured.

And you know what?  Maybe that's the real problem I have with the album.  Maybe it's my distaste of intentionally structureless jazz that draws me away from it.  Let me ponder that for a bit...

Oh, no wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit.  It's not just the fact that the structure is bizarre or jazzy, it's that it isn't there at all, and as a result nothing sticks with you other than "Clouded", and that's solely because it stands out for being much slower than the rest of the album and a whopping ten goddamn minutes long.  The songs all waft in and out of consciousness between epileptic fits of chaotic nonsense, noodling around with strange, dissonant wonkiness and grating harmonics for the better part of an hour, boring itself into your skull like an iron mosquito (note to self: pitch Iron Mosquito to Capcom for new Mega Man X game).  Other than that one track, nothing else is memorable for any reason other than the fact that it sounds like a chalkboard grinding its teeth.  This is seriously the most irritating music I've ever listened to, and this is taking into account shit like Neoandertals, Enmity, and that one random Buckethead impression that my buddy recorded that I post all the time.  I listen to albums while I review them, and this has taken me a month to write this far simply because Obscura gives me such a cataclysmic headache.  I know that saying any particular piece of music is "random" or "has no structure at all" and things of that sort almost always implies that the reviewer doesn't know what he/she's talking about and just can't fathom something unconventional, and I know how silly I must sound saying those same things about this album.  Obviously it isn't random, Gorguts can perform these songs live, they were very deliberately written, but they suuuuuuuck.

Another thing I really need to get across is Luc Lemay's vocals.  They are just... oh man, otherworldly bad.  Strangely enough, on one hand, I feel like they fit the music perfectly, as they're really tortured and chaotic sounding, like there's absolutely no skill as a death metal vocalist present and he's just yelling at the top of his lungs.  I'm not just saying that because I feel like there's zero skill involved in the instrumentals either (though that does also apply), but I feel like this style could work if the music was better, because it fits with the chaotic dissonance that the music revels in.  Agonized howling like this works well with certain torture doom bands like Senthil who go for a similar atmosphere, but with an album so chock full of irritation like this, it's merely another pin in my back.  It's all so non-stop and abrasive, and it works in all the wrong ways.  He howls like a guy making fun of death metal, and the guitars just hammer away and impossibly dissonant and wretched sounding chords and seemingly randomly placed harmonic squeals, and the drums sound like they're being performed by an eight year old who is just having the time of his life hitting everything he can.  This is a death metal version of The Shaggs, it sounds like a parody, and I will never understand how it attained such cult status for its "avant garde genius".

Honestly, Obscura will forever blow my mind.  This must be how death metal sounds to people who hate death metal.  And hell, even if I look at it from a different perspective, it doesn't help it.  Let's not view it as death metal, but instead prog metal or avant garde, either way it sounds like crap.  The music sounds bad, the guitars sound like a first grader just strumming and sliding his fingers up and down the neck, and the vocals are almost hilariously inept.  This bewilders me because I've actually since gone back and listened to some of the band's older material (which I'd avoided for years because this album pisses me off so much), and they're a perfectly capable band.  It's not like they're a bunch of Wesley Willis types that people latch on to for novelty (or just because they're so passionate about what they do that it's hard not to like), nor are they something like the aforementioned Shaggs or Complete where they are so transcendentally inept that they get dug up years later and passed around the internet for shiggles.  They wrote some solid death metal back in the day, and then around 1998 apparently decided to go a different direction.  That direction was downwards. 

Part of me can almost appreciate what Gorguts is going for here, I can tell they're trying to do something very different, they're trying to be much more dissonant than anything before them.  They're going for some kind of weird, avant garde style insanity.  Hell, maybe they're trying to tap into the musical representation of insanity itself.  It's possible, but it doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, the product presented to us sounds like absolute horsedick.  There is not one single aspect of Obscura that I can give praise to.  It's a haphazard mess of seemingly intentionally irritating parts thrown together with apparently no regard for the interconnecting parts nor the big picture.  The high pitched slides and squeals contrast with the dissonant banging in the same way a knifewound to the gut contrasts with a hatchet to the cranium.  The vocals are one dimensional yowls and shrieks and simply add another layer of needless frustration onto an already compounded pile of headache fuel.  How this ever became a cult classic is beyond me, because it sound like if I had just picked up instruments I'd never played before and wailed on them without any real idea how they worked.  And it's weird because it's deliberate.  It sounds like cacophonous shit on purpose, and that somehow makes it a brilliant masterpiece.

I didn't expect to give this a zero when I started writing, I really didn't.  I expected a single digit score, yes, but not a zero.  The more I listened, the worse it got.  It just gets more irritating with repeated listens, and the layers peel away not to reveal hidden genius, but simply different frequencies of irritation I hadn't noticed before.  There's nothing here to like, this is the absolute nadir of musicality.  I don't care how expertly this was written, I don't care how deliberate and complex it is.  Frankly, it sounds awful, goes on for far too long, and has nothing enjoyable to be found.  You want weird, late 90s death metal?  Listen to Starseed, otherwise hop off this album's dick and stop trying to find beauty inside the asshole of Shub Niggurath.


RATING - 0%

Sigh - In Somniphobia

The most pretentious thing I've ever written. Hands down.

I'm going to spoil the ending right off the bat, I pegged In Somniphobia as my potential Album of the Year way back in March, and here, rolling near the end of October, it's only cemented its position in the lead spot.  I try not to spoil my year end list beforehand, but I see nothing dethroning this, the only albums that were even remotely close were also released very early on in the year, and they lack all the intangibles that make this album so special.  I was unfortunately not introduced to the magic that is Sigh until roughly 2009, so Hangman's Hymn, undoubtedly the best album released in 2007, was unfortunately snubbed of my album of the year, so it's only fitting that they come roaring back so powerfully five years later to easily usurp the top spot from my mystery #2 album (I need to keep some suspense, people!).

In Somniphobia finds itself continuing Sigh's unending theme of evolution, considering they haven't written anything resembling the same album since their inception.  If you held a gun to my head whilst simultaneously dangling me over a pool of sharks and forced me to choose the Sigh album this resembles the most, I'd say Imaginary Sonicscape (maybe it's just me, but (assuming you all know the band's naming formula) the "I" and "H" albums always seem to be the best) based on how "out there" it is and how many different ideas are thrown into the huge melting pot.  A huge majority of this album isn't even based in metal, instead opting for a weird, tripped out jazz style, complete with long psychedelic jams and a genuinely terrifying atmosphere.  Seriously, listen to tracks like "Amnesia" or "Somniphobia" or portions of "Equale" and then promptly tell Cynic and Atheist to fuck right off.  This is the purest mixture of jazz and metal I've ever heard, and as a result I have even more reason to hate Cynic, those uninteresting hacks.  Perhaps it is my own personal psychosis, but there are several sections of the album that remind me of mid-to-late nineties videogame music as well.  For example, I could swear "Ending Theme: Continuum" is straight out of Goldeneye, and the mechanical, background noises of "Somniphobia" bring to mind the darker areas of Donkey Kong 64.  Keep in mind that I know the band isn't actually paying respects to the City of the Ancients Theme from Final Fantasy VII, but the point is that there's a nostalgic quality to the album, even upon first listen.  An esoteric warmth of familiarity lying dormant underneath a harrowing, bleak surface.

Sigh has been pretty squarely detached from their black metal roots from as far back as Hail Horror Hail fifteen years ago, and what they exhibit now is a mad avant garde blend of traditional metal with hints of black metal and electronic ambiance and trip hop and jazz and orchestral suites and pretty much anything else you can think of that ponytailed and neckbearded psychology majors in Agalloch shirts claim to listen to by the fireside with a nice Merlot.  I really couldn't explain in words precisely what Sigh sounded like if you had a gun pointed at my son, they truly are the most unique metal band in the world today.  They get crapped on by people (numbskulls) who accuse them of being silly carnival music masquerading as metal, and I can see where that comes from to a point.  The instruments used can definitely be tied to more festive origins, and the climax of the album, the build and release and final chorus of "Equale", can definitely be pointed to if you were to make this accusation, but if you were to actually make this accusation you can be safely disregarded and ignored since you are clearly an idiot.  When the album isn't wandering off down the dark and twisted path, there is indeed an eerie jubilance to be found.  I'll touch on this a bit more in depth later, but despite the light guitar tone and major melodies scattered about, this album is nothing if not nightmarish and dark.  "Fall to the Thrall" is probably the most in-your-face example of the harm the album surely wishes upon you, as it is the most aggressive and pessimistic track on the record.  "Purgatorium" and "The Transfiguration Fear" are more hooky, and despite the more upfront presentation they are still rather layered, with different little things you'll catch each time you listen to it, while simultaneously being interesting the first time you hear it (a rarity when it comes to songs like that).  I also feel I have to point out that the only metallic song during the middle stretch of the album is "Amongst the Phantoms of Abandoned Tumbrils", which isn't very riff heavy regardless, instead focusing on a suffocatingly frantic atmosphere.  It reminds me a lot of "Salvation in Flame" from Hangman's Hymn.  I also adore the opening of "Equale", as it sounds like Weather Report went down the rabbit hole and landed face first in a puddle of LSD.  Despite the seemingly random assortment of shit I've been mentioning, Sigh manages to actually not be proggy, which is a great thing since the proggier the music, the less likely I am to like it.  Everything is progressive in the technical sense because it moves along and evolves naturally throughout the length of the song, but they're still songs, with an intended beginning, middle, and end.  Unconventional as they may be, they're still well thought out and executed perfectly.

I need to step back for a moment before I really delve in to why this album is so perfect and point out just one thing that should sell you on the album alone: "The Transfiguration Fear" is, bar none, without a doubt, 10000% positively the best metal song written since... my god since "The Oath" all the way back in 1984.  I'm dead serious, never in my life have I heard one song with so many ideas, so many unconventional quirks, and so much raw and unfettered brilliance contained in under five minutes.  Everything I love about Sigh and about music in general is showcased and presented in the best possible way.  The main theme repeated throughout hooks instantly and never lets go, and literally every melodic line layered over the frantic and bizarre trad metal inspired fire underneath is endlessly hummable and fits perfectly.  I never thought I'd use these next twenty words in a row, but when the band breaks down into the Cosmo Canyon theme, the keyboard to saxophone to guitar solo is fucking magical.  It transitions so smoothly and builds up masterfully to one of the most soulful guitar solos ever found in the genre.  In this one section, Shinichi proves once and for all that people who claim that you cannot inject soul or feeling when it comes to soloing in metal are batshit crazy and flat out wrong.  It's a stunningly beautiful trio, and I promise you I will never get over how masterfully the entire section is handled.  The almost childlike chorus of "End of torment coming / See the world, it's to disappear" is bone chillingly haunting and executed  flawlessly.  That's something this song does exquisitely well, the atmosphere is downright unsettling despite an air of levity.  What I mean is that the drums drive the song forward with a strong galloping pattern, and the melodies seem almost merry in a way.  The theme is sometimes accompanied by clapping and there are sections with an elongated whistle in the background, and despite all these qualities that would normally never be found in a dark and apocalyptic track, it never comes off as bouncy or lighthearted.  Instead, the visual I'm given is of a madman who has strapped you to a gurney and is happily whistling to himself as he lifts up and inspects each and every sharp instrument he plans on using to dissect you with.  I can clearly see his sharp, Kefka-like face and his Glasgow smile, gleefully inspecting you from behind a rusty scalpel.  This hypothetical madman, and more importantly this song itself, absolutely revels in the evil that it embodies.  It loves how dark and horrifying it truly is, and uses every trick in the book to make you feel uncomfortable, and makes you beg for more.  This atmosphere is conveyed perfectly and only helps to reinforce my claim of this being the best song written in nearly thirty years.  Just the way the song fades out with the cheery rhythmic clapping and the distant whistling of the main theme, punctuated by church bells... spine tingling.  You, as a fan of music in general, are selling yourself short by not listening to "The Transfiguration Fear".

Okay, now that I've spent over 530 words describing only one song, you're probably wondering "well is the rest of the album as good?".  Amazingly, yes.  Not one moment of In Somniphobia falls flat, all sixty four minutes are crammed with equally brilliant and terrifying ideas, and this is one of the few albums you experience more than you hear.  Now this is going to sound strange coming from a guy who typically likes his music to be on the fast side, and usually melodic (hence my love of thrash, power metal, and punk), but this record is paced perfectly.  I mean it, and that's including the half hour consisting only of spacey jazz jams in the middle.  We're initially started off with a barnburner in "Purgatorium", before being treated to the auditory equivalent of being told you won the lottery whilst mid-blowjob that is "The Transfiguration Fear", and then we're treated with what I assume is meant to be a long suite.  I say this because track three is labeled as an intro and track nine as an outro, thus bookending over 40 minutes of music, most of which therein being the slow jazz based stuff and strange noises.  I wish I could adequately describe what the fuck is happening for the majority of this record, but I can't, but I love it.  It's so unremittingly bleak and suffocatingly heavy in atmosphere.  The whole experience just oozes malice, from Mikannibal's deep growls to Mirai's harrowing rasp.  If you could extract a physical manifestation of dread out of In Somniphobia, you'd need an aircraft hangar to store all of it.  I realize I'm rambling like an idiot fanboy, just tossing around hollow descriptors left and right, but I promise you they're all true and fitting.  Plus I'd have to write a damn dissertation if I were to touch on every single aspect of what makes this album so flawless (I mean, Mirai is credited for twenty one different instruments, and a helpful "et cetera" on the end).  There's so much to find, it's a veritable treasure trove of mad genius, a tapestry woven of flesh and nightmares.

And that word there plays a large part of this album's tone; "nightmares".  The word "somniphobia" means "fear of sleep", and knowing that really helps make yourself vulnerable to the horror within.  Have you ever read the famous internet "true story" of the Russian Sleep Experiment?  If not, a quick summary is that during WWII, Russian scientists decided to test the effects of sleep deprivation on five captured German POWs.  They achieve this by locking them in an observation room and steadily pumping in a small amount of a gas that prevents them from sleeping.  After a short time, the POWs start acting strangely, and it is later discovered that they began mutilating themselves to preposterous extremes.  It is discovered that putting the men under for surgery instantly kills them, and the madness has made the pain pleasurable.  It leads to some disturbing imagery and an overall unsettling atmosphere.  It's a decent short story, but most importantly it really helps illustrate what In Somniphobia means to me.  The deprivation of sleep leads to utter madness, and the imagery wrenched from this album is that of slimy, nasty, soul shattering madness.  The thought is that sleep will kill you, and so against your sanity you must persevere through the terror you're inflicting upon yourself.  The juxtaposition of the lighter elements (the light melodies and childlike whistling and clapping, for example) furthers the idea that there is a form of peace in insanity, and invites you to leave what you know behind and instead fight for the unknown and unbalanced lunacy of what's inside your own mind.

And this is the big draw of the album, the main reason it's so perfect in my eyes.  It's the same reason I love HORSE the Band's The Mechanical Hand so much.  Nobody will experience In Somniphobia the same way as anybody else.  Yeah, we're all hearing the same music, but it means something else to each individual.  The Mechanical Hand strikes me as a huge, overarching concept album about the cycle of an unfortunate and mentally broken life.  Beginning with the childhood rage and confusion of "Birdo", continuing to the struggles of adolescence and early adulthood, the hypothetical narrator fights against his shortcomings and psychological trauma, eventually culminating in his mental collapse and early death, with the soothing, peaceful piano at the end of "The Black Hole" symbolizing his eventual peace in his tumultuous existence finally coming to a close.  The thing is, that album has no narrator, there are no lyrical themes connecting one song to the next, and my journey is undoubtedly not what the creators intended for listeners to take away from the album.  But that's what makes it so magical, that's what it means to me.  That is the connection I have to the music, and how I relate the stories told to my own life, all within my own imagination.  That's what makes The Mechanical Hand more than mere music, it makes it art.  In Somniphobia is the exact same thing, it's art.  What this album is to me, is being on your deathbed, mere minutes left in your existence, everything you'd done in your life is about to be rendered moot and nobody is there to share in your sorrow in your last moments.  What you experience in your last conscious moments awake are a series of twisted hallucinatory fever dreams and nightmares from your past, all flooding back to remind you that no person is perfect, and no matter what good you've accomplished in your life, you've caused and equal amount of harm and suffering and heartbreak.  In your last moments, you aren't who you used to be, you are instead broken down into fragments of what used to be a whole consciousness, now splintered and scattered across landscapes adorned with horrible, shameful memories and twisted, deplorable monsters.  In Somniphobia is a journey through those last moments to me, as evidenced by the occasional punctuation of what sounds like a flatlining heart monitor, and the closing lines of "I'm sorry, but I must go now...".  Was this Sigh's intent?  Most likely not, but that's why it's so gorgeous.  I'm not having my hand held through a linear narrative, Sigh doesn't paint picture for me to marvel at.  Instead they give me a gigantic canvas and all the materials they have and say "Now paint me a picture".  The sheer imagination is given vicariously to the listener, and is then allowed to project whatever twisted nightmares one can imagine on to your own psyche.  This is an album that you, the listener, write as you listen to it.  By experiencing and embarking on this journey, you have become the creator of your own nightmare, and In Somniphobia merely supplied you the tools.

It's the intangibles that make this album so beautiful, and that's why I could safely predict its position at the pole before the year was really even in full swing.  There is nothing I don't like about this album, everything from the pacing, to the atmosphere, to the driving songs and the laid back songs and the mindboggling songs, just everything about In Somniphobia was done not only correctly, but flawlessly.  I hope I don't appear to diminish the prestige by awarding my second 100% in just over a year, something I planned on doing as sparsely as possible, but anything less than the absolute highest marks would be an insult to the brilliance displayed by Sigh on their ninth full length album.  Buy this album, kiss it every night, make love to it, clean up after yourself, and thank Mirai and company for the best experience you've had listening to music since the day you were born.  In Somniphobia is, in a word, divine.  "The Transfiguration Fear" is again, the greatest song written in generations, and "Equale" is astoundingly not far behind.  For the love of everything, listen to it, I implore you.  How often do you see me fanboy out quite this hard?

This was easily the most pretentious review I've ever written, (and already usurped my Wintersun review as the longest one I've written by word count) but if any record earned it, it's this one.


RATING - 100%