Japanese metal pioneers Sigh have unleashed Goh-Ka upon the world. The band’s 15th studio album is already being hailed by some as their finest work yet, adding another landmark release to a legendary career that has seen them release 14 previous studio albums, three live albums and embark on multiple sold-out tours around the globe.
To accompany the release, there’s a visualiser for ‘Kuso-Shi 1,2 and 3’. Watch it here:
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Goh-Ka is a new highlight of atmosphere, technical mastery, and meticulously arranged epics of metallic grandeur. Main-man Mirai Kawashima notes this as being as equally personal an album as ‘Shiki’, both musically and lyrically. From a musical perspective, if you were to place the main ingredients of Celtic Frost, Voivod, Black Sabbath, horror movies and Japan into a cauldron and stir it, you will get ‘Goh-ka’. Numerous additional spices such as psychedelic rock, prog rock and classical music are also evident over the album’s close to one-hour duration.
The album title ‘Goh-ka’ has a triple meaning, being: 業火 infernal fire scorching sinners, 劫火 a huge fire that burns down the world at the end of time, and 業果 karma.
The primary theme permeating the album is Kuso-zu; a series of Buddhist paintings or illustrations depicting the nine stages of a human body’s decomposition after death, created to encourage meditation on the impermanence of life, the inevitability of death, and the detachment from physical beauty and worldly attachment. It openly shows the harsh reality that no matter how beautiful you are, you’ll be dead and rot sooner or later. And Kuso-shi is a poem based on these paintings. The artworks on the cover and in the booklet of Goh-ka are therefore Kuso-zu themselves.
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Photo by Poka
