oh my god the new sigh record

We got this a month ago, but I am somehow just getting around to listening to it now and, oh my god, the new Sigh record is throwing me into all kinds of ridiculous, excited spasms.

I mean, good god, where the hell do I even start with this thing? By saying it just knocked Beach House out of my personal “Best of the Year So Far” top slot? By talking about how every time I play it I need to physically calm myself down, because I am overcome by how completely fucking awesome it is? By talking about how I am a hairsbreadth away from physically forcing people to sit and listen to this with me? How I may have actually just done that to a fellow eMusic employee?

OK, lemme start over:

Sigh are a Japanese metal band who skew theatrical. How theatrical? Every song is fully orchestrated — not just strings, man, oboes, trumpets, flutes. You thought you knew bombast? Friend, you do not know bombast until you listen to Sigh. “The Soul Grave” opens with an organ flourish, then divebombs into rotary-saw black metal riffs before, good god, a full-on orchestral fanfare kicks in, sounding like a Dead Pirate’s Imperial March — stern, determined, swooping upward and downward while vocalist Mirai Kawashima does the full-on black metal demonic growl over top. There are two songs with “Funeral” in the title — “The Red Funeral” is the lemmings-marching-toward-the-cliff soldier death dance, complete with processional snare while “The Summer Funeral,” belying the sunniness of the title, creeps and crawls, stomping horns crashing down like anvils and, two minutes in, a Hitchcock-movie piano arrives to signal the beginning of your end. It’s like, say you went to high school in hell, and it was time for your Spring Concert — this is what you’d be playing.

It’s pompous and puff-chested and a tiny bit ridiculous — but ridiculous in the best way possible. It’s forward-thinking and inventive and surprising, and there hasn’t been a second over the last 24 hours I haven’t felt like listening to it. And if all that’s not enough, I quote the following bit of trivia from Sputnik Music’s 5-star review of the record:

Scenes from Hell continues the band’s enigmatic nature with the addition of Dr. Mikannibal. A real life Ph.D currently working at the US National Laboratory, Dr. Mikannibal is also known for her propensity on the (alto) saxophone, her bellowing growl and her peculiar habits, which include recording topless and casually dining on everything from bull penis to cockroaches.

Download now, thank me later.