For the longest time, Sigh was a band whose unconventional, sometimes downright bonkers ideas intrigued me more than the execution, which often suffered from either sloppiness or their ambitions being hampered by technical or financial limitations. Ever since main man Mirai Kawashima stopped pretending Sigh is a real band around the release of 2018’s ‘Heir to Despair’, however, the results have been fantastic. And never more so than on ‘Goh-Ka‘. Their new folky, psychedelic, often doomy, sometimes thrashy black-ish metal album – told you they were odd – is a consistently engaging, at times horror-like adventure that straight-up ignores genre boundaries.

Stylistically, ‘Goh-Ka’ shares a lot of elements with 2022’s ‘Shiki‘, but the album is notably less straightforward. Its foundation consists of mainly doomy riffs that are frequently doubled on shamisen and orchestrated with other traditional Japanese string and wind instruments, though the riffs are always leading. There are elements of late-sixties mellotron prog, nightmarish psychedelic passages, full-on folk sections, and brief electronic bits. It may seem like ‘Goh-Ka’ could collapse under its own weight at any time, the fact that it doesn’t while that threat looms over the album constantly is an important part of why it is so fascinating.

Centerpiece of ‘Goh-Ka’ is the ‘Kuso-shi’ suite – nine parts, thirty minutes, spread out over four tracks – which covers the full range of styles on the album without at all sounding schizophrenic or disjointed. The ‘Jigoku-Zoshi’ diptych, on the other hand, represents ‘Goh-Ka’ at its most aggressive. Both parts are full of thrashing extreme metal riffs and busy rhythms, to the point where they would not have sounded out of place on last year’s ‘Hangman’s Hymn’ re-recording ‘I Saw the World’s End‘. ‘Jinmenjushin’ bridges those extremes, being a fairly aggressive and very band-centric song, but with a deceptively elaborate arrangement.

Performance-wise, everybody involved is firing on all cylinders here. Mike Heller’s drum work is nothing short of sensational. He is perfectly capable of handling the straightforward beats whenever needed, but he frequently goes absolutely crazy with his parts and the dynamic control his playing shows is incredible. It’s not just drums either; his percussion adds a lot of depth to ‘Goh-Ka’. Also, it will never cease to amaze me how well guitarist Nozomu Wakai – primarily known for his eighties-style hard rock playing – fits this more extreme framework. Both riffs and leads sound crisp and exactly intense enough for the album’s sound.

If you want an album to take you on a journey, there aren’t many releases from this year that will meet your demands quite as well as ‘Goh-Ka’. The album moves through a staggering amount of atmospheres, styles, and levels of intensity, yet it manages to make complete sense as a whole. Black metal purists may disagree, but in my opinion, ‘Goh-Ka’ is Sigh’s most fully realized, satisfying album, simply because all the elements enhance each other instead of getting in each other’s way. The term masterpiece is thrown around a bit too liberally these days, but ‘Goh-Ka’ certainly is one.

Recommended tracks: ‘Jinmenjushin’, ‘Kuso-shi 1, 2, and 3’, ‘Jigoku-Zoshi 1: Unkamusho’