Listening to SikTh is a little like playing one of those fairground games where a gopher appears randomly in one of several holes, with the contestant attempting to hammer the critter down in the second or so it is visible before it pops up somewhere else. Characterising the ambition that spread increasingly towards the rock mainstream in 2003, North London sextet SikTh join such scattershot genii as Dillinger Escape Plan, Mudvayne and December as math-metal wizards who sound like they gulp down an e-number cocktail between every song.
Opening track "Scent of the Obscene" is a collision of clattering drums, plucked bass, syncopated time signatures and an improbably anthemic chorus. No single track epitomises a record so diverse, but the album’s constant factor is the consummate playing. Twin guitars lock and spiral like Discipline-era King Crimson covering Pantera, Mikee Goodman and Justin Hills’ scalded dual vocals probe and dart like mongoose and cobra, with the whole underpinned by some phenomenally fluid and precise rhythm section work.
In keeping with the free-wheeling spirit of eclecticism, it isn’t all spasming riffs and maniac jabbering. "Emerson" is a melancholy piano elegy to a dead friend, "Tupelo" is a somewhat unlikely but effective cover of the Nick Cave original; "Can’t We All Dream?" is a slow burning accumulation of synth atmosphere and Goodman’s shamanistic chants, while Peep Show is the sole track to showcase Hill’s voice, and is a relatively conventional indie-rock offering (with ‘relatively’ being the key word – it’s hardly likely to be mistaken for Kings Of Leon). Crowning this restless display of inventiveness, the album plays out with Goodman’s Babel of voices on the spoken word narrative of "When Will The Forest Speak?".
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It’s a befuddlingly diverse assemblage of styles that at times sounds like a parakeet is agitatedly pecking at the CD track skip button, and yet rather than irritating the listener there’s something invigorating about it, with an underlying sense of order (albeit one that can’t immediately be grasped) rather than disorder. This isn’t to say that this brashly confident debut is in any way an easy or comfortable listen, but it is one to give heart to those who look at the rock landscape and otherwise see only the hyped and reheated.
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