Sigh – I Saw The World’s End – Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV Review

So hey, what the hell, let’s kick things off today with an old chestnut:

“Hegel says somewhere that, upon the stage of universal history, all great events and personalities reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add that, on the first occasion, they appear as tragedy; on the second, as farce” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul).

The grist for today’s particular dark Satanic mill** is, of course, the astonishingly excellent Japanese band Sigh’s full re-recording of their 2007 album Hangman’s Hymn – Musikalische Exequien under the (only marginally) less concise title I Saw the World’s End – Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV. If you let it, such a musical revisitation can pose thorny questions of ego, intent, audience, and maybe even a gosh-darn hermeneutics of the listening self.

But first, a punishing non sequitur by way of a brief timeline:

We – if we are lucky and the trade winds are true – will together get back to Metallica and Sigh a little later on. But first, can we mostly agree that the heavy metal historian’s reckoning of full album re-recordings is an odd workbench to belly up to? It almost seems that, from a purely theoretical standpoint, the very best outcome that a band might hope to achieve when putting together a complete second recording of an earlier album is something… respectably superfluous. That’s the best-case scenario, right? And on the other side of the ledger, a band might land anywhere from an inexplicable curiosity to a disastrously ill-conceived blot upon the very face of the earth. If bands like Blind Guardian and the Cavalera Conspiracy’s re-Sepulturas have come out the other side with dignity intact, others such as Exodus, Dimmu Borgir, Gorgoroth, and Manowar have… not.

All of this might point to the whole enterprise as a bum deal from the start, but let’s take Sigh’s mastermind Mirai Kawashima at his word: “Hangman’s Hymn… is one of my best compositions of my whole career, but it does not necessarily mean that this is my favorite Sigh album. The excessively monotonous drumming must be the biggest issue. The guitars are sloppy. The production is far from the best. And my orchestrations and vocals could have been much better. So what if we re-record this with better musicians and today’s production?”

I started listening to Sigh around the time Gallows Gallery was released, and although I have since become a big convert to Sigh’s proggiest album in all its weird, jaunty warmth, I didn’t love it at the time. When Hangman’s Hymn came out a couple years later, though, it was pretty much immediate love. Orchestral blackened thrashing madness? Yes please and thank you. And while I know I wasn’t listening with the same critical ear at the time, I don’t think I ever once would have thought, “Gee, this album shows a lot of promise but ultimately falls far short of its potential.” On I Saw the World’s End, though, Mirai has improved on Hangman’s Hymn so dramatically that it is almost staggering.

The reason I quoted Mirai at length about his aims in this re-recording is to underscore that the man delivered on each and every one of those aspects. For anyone doing an A-B comparison of the original and new recording, the biggest difference certainly comes down to the massively powerful drum performance of Mike Heller. Sure, the production also helps highlight his work, but the technique and inventiveness that he brings across the entire album really lights a fire that I didn’t fully realize was lacking from the original. All it takes is putting a quick ear on his beautifully articulated tumbling tom fills around the 0:40 mark of opening track “Introitus / Kyrie” to understand how much Heller helps level up the album.

The production (courtesy of Lasse Lammert) also plays a huge role in the overwhelming power of this new recording. Yes, in listening back to the original 2007 recording, there was a crackling, red-lined bleed to the production that gave it an aura of a black magic-possessed Kreator careening along the edge of a cliff, but Lammert’s work on this re-recording puts every last element of this highly complex album in clear view, separating the hammering drums from the clotted fat buzz of the bass and the omnipresent orchestral elements. The sound of this re-recording is almost surgically precise, and yet rather than turn the album into a bloodless academic exercise, it actually helps to highlight just how powerfully anthemic the songs are. I feel like I now hear things that, in the original, were too blurred to appreciate. For example, this new recording brings the galloping Iron Maiden-isms of “In Devil’s Arms” into even stouter, sharper relief.

And really, on and on the hits just keep coming. Mirai’s vocals whip through an enviously broad range of styles and emotions, the orchestral elements pop even more without ever overpowering the classicist heavy metal base of these blackened thrash gemstones, and new guitarist Nozomu Wakai brings the heat again and again with hairpin-tight riffing and sumptuously traditional guitar solo fireworks. If the 2007 Hangman’s Hymn felt a little bit like sticking a butter knife into an electric outlet while being thrown out by ushers in the lobby of Symphony Hall, the 2025 I Saw the World’s End feels like soaring over a sea of liquid gold while Danny Elfman conducts Mozart’s Requiem mass for a “scream for me, Long Beach”-rabid audience. If I have beaten around the bush here, I Saw the World’s End is an improvement on the original in every possible respect, and it elevates an already excellent album to a near-perfect 10 experience. Further, this re-recording makes it easier to see what has been obvious all along: that Mirai Kawashima is one of the best composers in all of heavy metal. (Though their music is very different, the more I listen to I See the World’s End, the more I see a sort of spiritual kinship between Mirai and John Cobbett of Hammers of Misfortune.)

Still, even with all that, I can imagine some naysayers who would argue that, whatever the flaws of the original, it’s still an honest document of the time and should be left alone. Nobody needs to see heavy metal subjected to a George Lucas-styled parade of endless and unbearably corny tinkering. But friends, I need to tell you something. In 9th or 10th grade, there was a girl in my math class named Teresa, and one day she had a friend of hers give me a tin of cookies that she had baked. I knew she was expressing a romantic crush in a very wholesome way, but I was so awkward and shy myself that I had no idea how to tell her I didn’t feel the same. So I just… ignored it. This happened more than 25 years ago, but I still think about it. I still wince and feel a little heartbroken wondering how she must have felt, and I wish I had responded differently – with kindness, with gentleness, with light humor, with anything. If I still carry that regret with me, after all these years, and because I know you have your own small hurts that you carry, why would we expect someone like Mirai to swallow his own dissatisfaction when he actually has the means to do something about it?

Here, again, is a nice bit from ol’ Karl “I probably wasn’t super great at parties” Marx (from that same Pauls translation): “Men make their own history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past. The legacy of the dead generations weighs like an alp upon the brains of the living.” From this perspective, whether Mirai Kawashima decided to re-record Hangman’s Hymn or not, its very existence is part of the history that he must necessarily carry with him. To loosen himself of that burden and release a beautifully savage new vision of this album into the world is a joyful choice.

Because after all, let’s not forget about Metallica. It is, of course, sheer coincidence that Sigh’s re-recording of Hangman’s Hymn is being released on the same day as the ultrameganotOK deluxe version of Metallica’s Load. But if you still find yourself a little skeptical about Sigh’s choice to re-record an album that you might not have thought needed improving, consider that Metallica, rather than re-visioning anything, have simply evacuated their overstuffed bowels of any possible leftover scrap they can muster. You could be the proud owner of not one, not two, but five full discs of riff tapes, demo versions, and alternate takes of such tantalizing morsels as “The Blue and The Gray (and the Red) (“Ronnie” Vocal Idea),” “Bitch (“Ain’t My Bitch” Take 15),” and “Jack (“The House Jack Built” More FX Alternate Mix).” I suppose you could call both endeavors artistically dubious, but on a sliding scale of crassness there’s really no competition.

After all, this magnificent new rendering of I See the World’s End isn’t just about the artistic legacy or commercial aspirations of Sigh and Mirai Kawashima. It can also be about any one of us who brings our own freighted Alps of history and experience to the act of listening. Because we, who are listening to Hangman’s Hymn, whether then or MMXXV: aren’t we also listening to ourselves listen to it? Watching ourselves be listeners in a new way? For me, one of the most interesting changes between the 2007 and 2025 versions is how the opening melody of the album-closing title track (which is first previewed on organ in the “Overture” a few tracks prior)  included a full backing vocal choir in the original that has not been replicated for the new version. In coming to terms with this new version, that’s the one piece that initially stuck out to me as a disappointing difference. The rest of the new version of the title track is absolutely immaculate, and the sharpened production really serves to highlight the fun and sophistication of how Mirai brought in a bunch of musical motifs from earlier songs into this massive capstone. But once I realized that change, I could watch myself listening to it, and I can bring my own history with the album into the present. We can all, in this way, become our own choir, carrying an internal polyphony on the side stage of our less-than-grand-historical dramas. Not as tragedy, not as farce, but as witness.

** “And did those feet / in ancient time…”

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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