ALBUM REVIEW
SIGH - Goh-Ka
eath, decay, tradition and extremity converge.
SIGH’s “Goh-Ka” represents a point that cannot be understood simply as a continuation of the musical language the band has developed over more than three decades. Considering the Tokyo-based band’s discography, which stretches from its black metal roots in the early 1990s into the much broader territories of avant-garde and progressive metal, what stands out here is not simply the way it brings different genres together, but how that diversity can be gathered around the album’s own conceptual axis. While “Goh-Ka” explores death, decay, impermanence and karma through the Buddhist Kuso-zu depictions, it is also constantly moving between beauty and deformation, tradition and extremity, melodic order and unruliness.
At the heart of the album is Kuso-zu, a collection of Buddhist paintings and drawings depicting the nine stages of the human body’s decomposition after death. For this reason, the darkness of “Goh-Ka” does not stem solely from black metal aesthetics. The theme itself is rooted in contemplating the inevitability of death through physical transformation, and SIGH carries that idea into the structure of the music as well. Japanese vocals, traditional Japanese instruments, and the Western metal and progressive music elements the band has employed for years do not function here as decorative details, but as different parts of the same world.
The opening ‘Kuso-shi 1, 2, and 3’ establishes this approach within the album’s first few minutes. Its mid-paced black-doom character combines with harmonized guitar melodies, keyboards and sharp vocals, while the presence of traditional instruments such as shamisen, koto and flute-like sounds gives the music a distinctly Japanese character. This is where one of SIGH’s major achievements begins: the traditional instruments do not feel like exotic embellishments added on top of metal riffs after the fact; they become part of the composition alongside the melodic and rhythmic movement of those riffs. For the same reason, it would be insufficient to describe “Goh-Ka” simply as an album that adds folk or progressive elements to black metal.
This structure expands further as the album progresses. ‘Jigoku-Zoshi 1 – Unkamusho’ and the subsequent ‘Jigoku-Zoshi 2 – Tokatsujigoku’ represent the album’s aggressive side with thrash-influenced riffs and more animated rhythms. By contrast, ‘Anzenshokon’ builds a more dreamlike space over heavy doom riffs, recalling 1970s progressive rock. The transitions here are not simply a matter of SIGH moving randomly between genres. Black metal, doom, psychedelic rock, folk, classical music and electronic elements serve different functions within the same piece; at times they expand a riff, at times they alter the atmosphere, and at times they create contrast before the transition into the next section.
The Kuso-shi passages, spread across roughly thirty minutes, are the most extensive example of this compositional approach. By distributing the nine stages of decomposition across different points of the album, this structure prevents “Goh-Ka” from becoming a collage of disconnected ideas. While the individual pieces can pull in very different directions on their own, they complement one another within the sequence. ‘Unputenpu’ combines its folk character, melodic structure and tempo changes within a more compact form, creating one of the album’s most memorable moments. Mikael Åkerfeldt’s guitar solo also settles into the track not merely as a contribution from a renowned guest, but as a natural touch that fits SIGH’s progressive and psychedelic side.
Another notable aspect of the album is that the fundamental center of gravity holding all this material together is still metal. Nozomu Wakai’s guitars move effortlessly from fast black metal passages to progressive sections and melodic leads, while the traditional metal character of the riffs never disappears beneath the experimental elements. Mike Heller’s drums, meanwhile, significantly heighten the album’s rhythmic movement. The way straightforward beats recede when necessary, only for more complex rhythmic ideas to come forward in denser sections, carries the constantly shifting character of the songs. At the same time, the drums occasionally feel physically detached from the other instruments within the mix, providing a small but significant challenge to the notion that the production is entirely flawless.
Because the album’s genuinely debatable aspect is not musical inadequacy, but excess. SIGH’s abundance of ideas works in the album’s favor for the most part, but its roughly hour-long runtime demands serious attention from the listener. Even a single change of direction within a song can correspond to several distinct musical ideas on its own. As a result, this is not a record to play in the background; it requires following the relationships the individual pieces establish with one another. In some sections, the theatrical and grandiose approach also comes close to over-staging the music rather than reinforcing its dark subject matter. The scale of the classical and progressive elements occasionally pushes the unsettling side of the black metal into the background.
Still, it is difficult to argue that this excess contradicts the album’s fundamental aesthetic idea. A work built around death and decay does not have to be monotonous or merely bleak. Rather than confining the impermanence of life to an atmosphere of mourning, “Goh-Ka” approaches it through a constantly transforming musical language. This is precisely where the coexistence of beauty and decay gains meaning: elegant Japanese melodies, heavy riffs, black metal vocals, dark ambient passages and psychedelic sections do not neutralize one another within the same whole, but instead reveal different facets of it.
From this perspective, “Goh-Ka” is less a repetition of SIGH’s past than a reorganization of the band’s long-standing compositional curiosity around a more defined focus. Traditional Japanese music goes beyond serving as a marker of identity here; it gives the album’s ideas of death, impermanence and karma a sonic form. The fact that SIGH continues to push genre boundaries after a career approaching four decades is not, in itself, the important point. What matters is that this experimental impulse has here developed into a compositional logic that serves the album’s themes.
“Goh-Ka” is not an easy SIGH record to consume, and that is also where much of its strength lies. Some of the album’s theatrical choices may not convince everyone, while ‘Kuso-shi 8 And 9 / Mettaijakujo’ does not sustain quite the same impact created by the preceding sections. Even so, the album defines SIGH’s position within avant-garde metal not merely through the innovations of its past, but through how far the band can still push itself today. The most important achievement of “Goh-Ka” is not its ability to bring together as many different genres as possible, but its ability to keep the severity of black metal, the melodic and ceremonial character of Japanese music, the freedom of progressive composition, and the weight of death within the same aesthetic framework. SIGH is still speaking in a language of its own here—and continues to show just how far that language can expand.
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