Sigh
Scenes From Hell

I came into possession of the latest effort by Sigh, hopeful for a work even remotely comparable to their "Imaginary Sonicscape," a masterpiece that managed to bring fresh air to a stagnant scene. But the risk one runs when playing so-called "avant-garde metal" (a label only applicable to a few bands, in my opinion) is that all this ostentatious 'avant-garde' may not be there: in fact, most of the albums presented to us with this label innovate nothing at all; they do not go beyond the canons of classic and 'banal' metal to reinvent it, but merely insert alternative instrumentation (synths in abundance and violins galore) in a context already familiar to us. The early records of this genre might have been interesting, but hearing the same old story over and over will sooner or later become unpalatable even to the metalhead who feels 'open-minded' just because in his metal albums, between one growl and another, there are exquisite passages of violin or piano.

Now... the magnificent and futuristic "Imaginary Sonicscape" worked where this new full-length, "Scenes From Hell," fails miserably. I admit that I am not a fan of the band and have missed much of what many call their evolution (at least from Imaginary Sonicscape onwards), but if they have arrived at an album like this, in my opinion, it would be more accurate to speak of involution. While every track of the aforementioned masterpiece (despite being sacrificed by a certain repetitiveness) made one scream out at the genius, the 'plot twist' that you would never expect in a metal album (a sensation elicited by only a few other bands, including Arcturus, Manes, and UneXpected), here we are led by the hand into the fair of banality between one yawn and another.

Predictability reigns supreme in "Scenes From Hell," an album that can be truly avant-garde only for a novice of this genre/non-genre with unstable characteristics. Having heard the opener "Prelude to the Oracle", you've essentially heard all the others: the rhythms have returned to being tight as they used to be (and therefore closer to the black metal of the early days), and the brass, pompous and redundant, invade the scene for almost the entire duration of the tracks. One constantly gets the feeling of listening to a self-referential and baroque album which, in 2010, in all honesty, no one really needed, the work of a band now resting on its laurels, followed by a throng of fans ready to shout 'masterpiece' every time. And it is with sad resignation that after five listens, I realize that these inventive Japanese have abandoned their colorful musical sketches of Nietzschean conspiracies, scarlet dreams, and ecstatic transformations to give life to the usual boring clone that would be more correctly included in the symphonic black metal genre. 

The predominance of the sax had raised hopes for a fetishist of the instrument like me, just as the presence of the supreme guru of the most esoteric industrial and UK-made neofolk (David Tibet, who is still lovable despite reciting a few precious verses), but the expectations were absolutely not met, and among all the possible solutions to resolve some tracks (electronic flourishes, unpredictable finds à la "Slaughtergarden Suite" that turned an oppressive piece into an almost danceable one!), one falls into the usual short and very fast solo, which only increases the already considerable dose of yawns.

If you loved this band and the essential album that I fear I have already mentioned too many times, avoid this pretentious mess that could definitely mislead someone trying to approach Sigh for the first time.