More than three decades into one of metal’s most fearlessly strange careers, Sigh are still finding new ways to unsettle. The Japanese avant-garde veterans have shared “Unputenpu,” the first single from their forthcoming 14th album Goh-ka, and they’ve brought a heavyweight guest along for the ride: Opeth mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt, who contributes a lead guitar part to the track. The song arrives with an arresting animated video from Costin Chioreanu.
Frontman and band architect Mirai Kawashima framed the song as the culmination of a rhythmic idea he’s been chasing across several records, given extra lift by his special guest: “Honestly, I have no idea at all how the song sounds to other people. Shuffle is the world-widely used rhythm and Japan is no exception. I’ve been using this rhythm in the songs like ‘Shikigami’, ‘Ecstatic Transformation’, and ‘Midnight Sun’ but I guess I have completed my own Japanese style on ‘Unputenpu’. The guitar lead by Mikael Åkerfeldt from Opeth definitely gives another boost to the song.
Beneath its groove, the track wrestles with forces far larger than the individual. Kawashima described its meaning in stark, fatalistic terms, hinting that it draws on something he lived through without spelling it out: “‘Unputenpu’ expresses the idea that whether a person is blessed with good fortune or struck by misfortune is determined by God’s will, the will of heaven, fate or something totally beyond our control and we cannot do anything to change it. Anyone could die today or lose somebody you love. Life can be cruel any time. The song is based on my personal experience but I don’t want to talk about the details…”
That preoccupation with mortality runs straight to the heart of the album itself. The title Goh-ka carries a triple meaning across its kanji: 業火, the infernal fire that scorches sinners; 劫火, the vast blaze that consumes the world at the end of time; and 業果, karma. Threaded through the record is the concept of Kuso-zu — a tradition of Buddhist paintings that chart the nine stages of a human body’s decomposition after death. The images were made to prompt meditation on the impermanence of life, the certainty of death, and the shedding of physical vanity and worldly attachment, confronting the viewer with a blunt truth: however beautiful a person may be, decay and death come for everyone. The album’s Kuso-shi are poems built from those paintings, and the artwork adorning the cover and booklet of Goh-ka are themselves Kuso-zu.
For the recordings, the band’s core of Kawashima, vocalist Dr Mikannibal and guitarist Nozomu Wakai was rounded out by two notable hands: bassist Frédéric Leclercq of Kreator and acclaimed American drummer Mike Heller. Goh-ka was tracked across multiple studios and, as with past Sigh releases, mixed and mastered by Lasse Lammert at LSD studios in Germany.
Goh-ka is due September 4 via Peaceville Records.
Goh-ka track listing:
- “Kuso-shi 1, 2, and 3”
- “Jigoku-Zoshi 1: Unkamusho”
- “Anzenshokon”
- “Kuso-shi 4, 5, and 6”
- “Shoso”
- “Unputenpu”
- “Jinmenjushin”
- “Jigoku-Zoshi 2: Tokatsujigoku”
- “Kushukankyo”
- “Kuso-shi 7”
- “Kuso-shi 8 and 9 / Mettaijakujo”
