SATURDAY SONGS TO GET STONED TO (*DOUBLE DOSE*): CITAY – “FORMER CHILD” / SIKTH – “SKIES OF MILLENIUM NIGHT”

Baby — don’t be like that. We haven’t been going out for that long, and…well yeah, I know, our Saturday date is pretty much implied at this point but sometimes a man just has to do his own thing, you dig? In any case, I’m sorry I didn’t make it to your sister’s funeral or whatever the hell we were supposed to get into last weekend…can I make it up to you this Saturday with two awesome songs?

San Francisco’s Citay is by no means a metal band, but when this track cranks it up with wailing guitar, somehow the band’s heady, personal folk metamorphoses into an epic, emotional, and yes, kind of brutal mood — that’s when the horns come out and the metal takes over. There’s been some talk recently in these here parts about “folk-metal”, and I’ve been somewhat surprised that we could even place certain [shitty] bands under that genre heading. To me, any subgenre that uses the word folk in its description needs needs needs to display a strong sense of beauty, or at least something extremely natural/organic, in the mellow sense. Yes, when you combine any type of music with metal, I guess there is to be some expected crankage (either in volume or tempo), but in my opinion, this track by Citay qualifies as being metallic mostly because of how engulfing the damn song is.

CITAY – “Former Child”, from Little Kingdom (2007)

What can I possibly say about British prog-metal masters Sikth that my esteemed colleague Vincent Von Neilshtein, Esq. hasn’t already jizzed written about on this site in the past? Well probably not much but I do feel like this particular tune deserves some attention. Melodic, punishing, more progressive than the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, “Skies Of Millenium Night” starts out quite aggressive and really doesn’t let up for the first few minutes. The screams begging you to “LOOK AT THE SKY, LOOK AT THE SKY” seem like a warning, as if we are under attack from [more] alien spaceships, but then the singer mutters under his breath “It’s so beautiful…” and the tune takes on a whole new meaning. And then around 3 minutes, 8 seconds in, the fit really hits the shan and the band reminds us what prog truly means.

When Vince pulled 2006’s Death Of A Dead Day out of his always-massive stack of promo CDs and dropped the levity of Sikth on my unsuspecting ears, I really thought they couldn’t crank it any further than that album. But after I had [finally] procured their first full-length and I heard the breakdown of this song (from their prior album, no less) I nearly dropped an immediate and fruitful load. It’s among the best and certainly most fluid of any prog breakdown I have ever heard, and it manages to retain a very ethereal tone as well, especially near the end of the track. FUCKING…PHENOMENAL.

SIKTH – “Skies Of Millenium Night”, from Trees Are Dead And Dried Out Wait For Something Wild (2003)

-KW