Heavy Song of the Week: Sigh Transform into Melodic Folk Metal Magicians on “Unputenpu”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Kill Count Increase” from Hatebreed. I would not have anticipated the debut single of Goh-Ka, the upcoming album from Sigh, to be a melodic folk metal track, but their long career has taught us all that expectation is the enemy when it comes to their music. It feels fitting that Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth provides a guest guitar solo here given how the closing of the song reads like something that would not be out of place on the last three or four Opeth albums — albeit here contextualized with Japanese traditional instrumentation and a pronounced sing-song melodicism that is a pleasant shock. I doubt anyone who’s known of Sigh, who started as a crusty black metal band before metamorphosing into a progressive metal troupe, could have seen them making something so undeniably accessible, but it works so well it almost feels puzzling that they hadn’t before now. The atmosphere of “Unputenpu” calls to mind Turisas, a now-defunct folk metal band that incorporated enough death metal fringes that it transcended the genre and was able to connect with people outside of that sonic world. In this case however it’s inverted, with a band that was previously known for being strikingly bizarre and avant-garde suddenly finding a clear and direct melodicism that’s jaw-dropping. Additionally, the fact that Akerfeldt’s solo is a harmonization traditional heavy metal solo is likewise a shock, with lots of UFO and Scorpions vibes rather than anything extreme or even stridently proggy or bluesy as his common soloing motifs tend to be. Sigh’s ability to transition to a sound that feels suddenly so commercially viable and approachable without losing their grandiloquent mad-genius energy is an absolute thrill and bodes well for the upcoming record. It’s our Heavy Song of the Week. Honorable Mentions Judiciary – “Wall of Skulls” You know as a metallic hardcore band you’ve done it right when your comments section is exactly three things: people saying it’s not really metal, people saying it’s not really hardcore, and people saying it’s hard as fuck. Judiciary truck in the same approach to metallic hardcore as Hatebreed, marrying a frankly undeniable death metal forcefulness to beatdown hardcore in a way that bypasses all functions of a human brain that are not moshing or headbanging. There’s enough little frills in here to demonstrate that this is a deliberately crafted song, not one generated by limitations per se, without getting in the way of its very mission-oriented writing. You will press play and you will headbang around your office, your living room, the bus, wherever you happen to be, because Judiciary delivers the goods. Krallice – “Living Useless Ritual” While some bands can be described as falling on one side or the other of either extreme metal or King Crimson-style progressive rock, Krallice manage to balance precisely on the apex of those conjoined lines in such a way that calling them only one makes you immediately think of all the aspects of their sound that doesn’t cover. Once more, they unleash a thrilling track that’s as cerebral as it is animalistic, managing to find a hybridization between intense intellectualism and direct feral attack. Their songwriting has only become more eventful and hooky as their career has gone on, now finding a perfect balance between the spaciousness of their early work and the density of the period after. TEMIC – “Ceased to Be” It’s rare these days that I encounter a prog metal song that I genuinely cannot count. The fact that this song shocked me in such a way isn’t a mere technical trick; the song is incredibly catchy and grooving, which makes the implacable time signature that much more impressive. TEMIC show precisely why chops like this are interesting to metal listeners. Meshuggah doesn’t delight us because it’s complicated but because you only start to really notice the mind-boggling complexity when you try to break down the groove you’ve been riding to. The credits on this album explain that casual sense of total mastery, with players from the Neal Morse Band, Haken, and even the wildly underrated 22. There was a period in djent’s history that it diverged strongly from a part of its origins in the twisting prog metal of Fates Warning and Dream Theater; TEMIC sees this relationship restored, bringing with it huge melodies alongside the gnarly rhythms. This is an absolute beast of a song.