The awaited debut album from Sigh & Explode is due. After extensive touring for two years, the band has shaped an album with parental guidance from Emil Nikolaisen. The band is a terrific live act, with tension, release and intensity — and capturing this energy onto the sequencer timeline is a worthy challenge indeed.
The 10 track/32 minutes long album twists and turns with an immense intensity, but it never lets you drift away. It screams for attention through angst driven lyrical themes of abstract opposition towards life’s shifting balance. The motive is well hidden behind layers of progressive instrumentalists, but collides boldly and cold-hearted. This is a genre where listeners often have to read lyrics to grasp the meaning of a song, however in S&E’s vocal terrain words are second to the agenda of topping the sound with extra violent icing.
The record is without obvious single material, nor calculated catchphrases. It works best as an album from A to B and kicks off with the excellent “To Raise the Dead Belongs to the Blackest Art”. The song sets a mood that is present until the end of “An Epic Moment in “Spontaneous Human Combustion”. The sound of the record is ruthless and distinct. This is why this debut album works; Sigh & Explode spill their guts on a track like “The Van Gogh Sky Shrinks the City…”, and they do it well.
Sigh & Explode is part of a fine tradition of Norwegian bands in the line of musical fire. The band is anchored within genres like hardcore, screamo, post-punk and post-rock. Drawing domestic comparisons and friendship with bands like Rumble in Rhodos, Accidents Never Happen, The Box of Mothers, Gerilja and Dominic, and At the Drive-In/The Mars Volta and The Blood Brothers on a global scale.
Their 2007 mini album ¡O Bailan Todos o No Baila Nadie! (2007) established Sigh & Explode’s more than promising potential, and last year’s Zoom Tour victory set a hallmark of their live performances. Sigh & Explode is destined to lead way for other bands within the genre. They have talked the talk and walked the walk towards their debut album without shortcuts or compromise, creating an album that is vibrant and sets a standard. These Seem Like Tarantulas should become proof of contemporary hardcore stardom.
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