Reunions can be shit. Really, really, really shit. At The Drive-In’s 2012 comeback sucked. Limp Bizkit returned in great form before showing us their ‘Gold Cobra’ and subsequently realising we didn’t want to see any of that. They now think it’s acceptable to pack 20 minutes of covers into an hour-long set. It’s probably best if you forget those last two Fall Out Boy albums, too.
A disturbingly large portion of the music industry is fuelled by nostalgia, but last year saw several bands riding that wave before justifying the hype. Faith No More delivered ‘Sol Invictus’, their first record in nearly two decades, and made Muse look like a right load of part-timers at Download.
System Of A Down have yet to give us new material, but that Wembley Arena show was the best they’ve looked and sounded on stage since the early noughties. And yeah, that Refused album wasn’t exactly ‘The Shape Of Punk To Come’, but have you seen Elektra go off in the live environment? Mental.
So when Sikth were announced to play Download in 2014, the metal world got a bit excited. The Watford outfit have influenced no end of bands in the last decade or so and without them we probably wouldn’t have Architects, not to mention a whole host of technically-minded metal bands who liberally pinch from Sikth as much as they do Meshuggah and the Dillinger Escape Plan.
“I dunno man,” the band’s drummer, Dan Foord, said when asked about Sikth's impact on the heavy metal world. “I guess it's a compliment, isn't it? Good luck to them [new bands]. We wouldn't exist without Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Pantera, Slayer. I guess the difference is Sikth draw on decades of music and a variety of styles from the non-metal world.”
Sikth remain an anomaly. While it would be easy to lump them in with Dillinger, their musicality is of a different breed. Mikee Goodman and Justin Hill’s vocal interplay is unlike anything else in metal, taking on the guttural grotesquery of their beloved genre but delivering it in a manner more akin to hip-hop, finishing each other’s lines and rattling along at an unholy pace.
Graham Pinney and Dan Weller’s discordant riffing blurs the lines of James Leach’s flurrying bass, sprinting through hellish time signatures like jazz spat from the larynx of Satan, while Goodman’s spoken word pieces could have been lifted from a William Burroughs novel. ‘The Trees Are Dead & Dried Out Wait For Something Wild’ ripped the world a new one back in 2003 and ‘Death Of A Dead Day’ did it again in 2006.
It had been nine years since any fresh material when, in 2015, Sikth put out their new record, ‘Opacities’. An ever-growing fanbase had been starved of music so expectations were, to be modest, astronomical. Surely there must have been some biting of fingernails, gnashing of teeth and changing of pants?
“Yeah, I guess so,” Foord admitted. “I've been writing music and coming up with ideas that could potentially be new Sikth since we split – I never stopped. However, some of the band haven’t been involved in writing or performing much since Sikth. So it was a little bit of a concern. But, to be honest, every record we've ever written has been a difficult process. Some things this time were easier. For instance, this time around we already had two records as a template for what a Sikth record could and should be.
“Every record is difficult, but this one presented a different challenge; the band, as a whole, are rarely in the same place at the same time. That made the process of writing difficult. Fortunately, we were only writing five songs together.”
Ah, yes. ‘Opacities’ is an EP. Sometimes a stop-gap device or a taster of things to come from a full-length, the EP has now become a go-to due to its relative cheapness and the wavering attention span of the modern iTunes audience. While some may have bemoaned the lack of a ‘proper’ album, it was in the band’s best interests.
“We discussed doing a full-length, but it was always our intention to write it and release it in the same year,” Foord said. “We probably still wouldn't have delivered a full-length by now. We also wanted to see what the process of writing together after all these years would be, without the pressure of having to write 10 to 12 songs.”
Bearing in mind that ‘Death Of A Dead Day’ took nearly two years to write while Sikth were an active, fully-functional band, it seems rational for them to take baby steps with ‘Opacities’. Well, baby steps in the sense that the baby is 50 feet tall and made of titanium and gobstoppers.
Just go listen to ‘Opacities’. Imagine having not written together as a band for that long and coming back with Behind The Doors. You can’t imagine that. None of our tiny, human minds can comprehend such greatness. Such perfection. ‘Opacities’ is Sikth proving that the metal scene is a lazy fucking lummox. They still sound like they’re from the 41st millennium. To use that tired, overused-to-the-point-of-it-coming-up-in-auto-correct phrase: they’ve never sounded better.
“I think Sikth’s situation is quite unique, as we split after only two albums,” Foord said. “I think we may still have yet to record our best album. The band has always been very dysfunctional, so if we can find a way to work together, we could potentially write something even more special.”
When Goodman was quizzed on the future of the band back in 2014 by Scuzz TV, Sikth hadn’t played a note of music or even started rehearsals yet, so his attitude was amusingly blasé: “All we’re gonna do at the moment is, like, concentrate on Download, then see what happens. You know what I mean?” Thankfully, Foord has elaborated for us. Sort of.
“I have a clear idea in my mind as to what the band should do, but we'll see,” he said. “I think a new level of solidarity is what the band needs. If we can work towards a common goal, then there is no stopping us. But in general, the response we have had since reforming has been pretty amazing. I guess it's confirmation that what we were trying to do was genuinely unique.”
To call Sikth unique is like calling the sky blue or calling politicians liars. Much like Refused, they have returned to a world that’s just starting to appreciate how ground-breaking they were and, in Sikth’s case, still are.
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