SCORN DEFEAT

There's many reasons why the murder of Euronymous by Varg Vikernes was a tragedy, but one of them is that it gave Varg a big old platform of infamy from which to promote his crank racist views, whilst at the same time it put an end to Euronymous' activities through Deathlike Productions growing the black metal genre.

One illustration of this is Scorn Defeat, the debut album by Sigh. It's easy to forget in these days of the Internet, where you don't need to go that far to get a diverse picture of the worldwide metal scene, that it was much harder even in the early 1990s for an act to get much of a following outside its home turf. That's why it was so great of Euronymous to reach out and give this Japanese act a European release, flying in the face of the national rivalries that had characterised some facets of the black metal scene at the time (not to mention the toxic fascist elements that had been creeping in here and there) and recognising that good music knows no national or cultural borders.

For their part, Sigh capture the early 1990s black metal sound perfectly but also bring in the occasional melodic, near-symphonic moments (with some passages resembling something out of a classic JRPG soundtrack). Even with these sections, this is about as traditionally kvlt as Sigh ever got, but it's a good fit for the classic Deathlike Silence period.