ANYONE who’s ever owned a Sikth album must be flabbergasted that Britain’s answer to Slipknot still elude huge commercial success.
Bland Street Bloom live at Download 2014
While the band’s debut, 2003’s The Trees Are Dead And Dried Out Wait For Something Wild, blew both the press and broadcast media away, it failed to inspire the same love in the record buying public. With their unfathomable combination of core-like breakdowns, black metal vocals, emo-vocals, thrash attacks, anthemic choruses and deft guitaritry, maybe they just never had the pop appeal of their contemporaries. Until now.
From the Korn-alike vocals of Summer Rain and the melodic Way Beyond The Fond Old River to the Opeth guitar tones that ring throughout, the album is edge-of-your-seat-tastic. It’s packed with the same brutal guttural black metal screams, occasional blast-beats, clean yet ominous vocals and mad DEP style lead melodies spliced together with straightforward solos as before, but this time it’s way more accessible. Some songs, like Part Of The Friction, suggest they’re going to be easy-going metal, but the music always heads off into freak-outville in the end.
With an average track length of five minutes, there’s time to indulge. The album does well to showcase the juxtaposition of the polar sounds of Sikth – heart string tugging melodies vie for cone- space with erratic, aggressive berserking rage.
If justice is to be done, Death Of A Dead Day will be the album that drags Sikth out of the shadows and into the limelight. Not sure Radio 2’ll like the title though.
UPDATE: There was no justice, and the band split up two years later. However, they’ve now reunited.
This was published in Metal Hammer issue 154.
Read the review of Sikth at the Download Festival 2014 here.
