SIGH

Heir To Despair

CANDLELIGHT Japanese eccentrics extend their garden of unearthly delights 1997’s Hail Horror Hail was our first evidence that Japan’s most cult black metal entity had snapped, and they’ve been deliriously bouncing around their own multicoloured padded cell ever since. On their 11th album since 1993, Sigh still defy convention and classification, continually piquing the listener’s interest with rapid ideas and sounds tumbling out of leftfield; we should all by now know that multiinstrumentalist frontman Mirai Kawashima combines a visionary streak with a puckish sense of humour and an eclectic set of obsessions (Venom, Bond soundtracks, krautrock) that are merged and perverted like Freudian dream motifs in a Dali painting. Dizzying, quirky, compulsive and crammed with febrile incident as ever,

Heir To Despair digs deeper than usual into Japanese musical traditions while full-bloodedly embracing their wackiest 70s psych-prog tendencies and maintaining a spine of manic 80s occult thrash. No flies on Sigh.