Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows
Les Fleurs Du Mal

The entity Sopor Aeternus has always been a highly revered deity in the music temple of my home: from the raw dark of the first demos to the sublime works of maturity, up to the electronic turn of the superb "La Chambre d'Echo," the quality of Anna-Varney Cantodea's artistic gestation has remained over the years nothing short of excellent, with works always diverse and inspired, oscillating, in my opinion, between great and good.

However, this reverence began to wane when Sopor Aeternus's works started to circulate in ultra-limited editions, and furthermore, in the expensive form of box sets with prohibitive and exorbitant prices, even for the pockets of a Lapo Elkann.

Over a year after its release, "Les Fleurs du Mal" finally appears on the market in the canonical version at a reasonable €18. Breathing a sigh of relief, I immediately launched into the much-coveted purchase. But what a surprise it was for me, browsing through the hefty pink booklet (!!!) that accompanies the CD (rich as usual with photos depicting "our hero" in the most bizarre and hallucinatory poses), to find myself in front of such a transformation of the visual poetry that has always been a fundamental component in the art of Sopor Aeternus. The artwork, meticulously curated as usual, indeed shows images and photos (in their own way) that are entertaining, exuding humor, albeit macabre, quite unusual considering the artist in question.

And yes, with "Les Fleurs du Mal," Anna-Varney seems to have finally discovered the dick!

After years of nonsense, laments, lyrics of the tenor "how disgusting I am, how disgusting everything is, leave me alone, leave me in the dark, I want to die in solitude", it seems that the journey of accepting one's body and sexual orientation has indeed progressed greatly! Although the eternal complex of inadequacy is not entirely overcome, there is a perceptible slight easing of tones and atmospheres, becoming decidedly less suffocating and lugubrious than before.

Yes, there is acceptance in "Les Fleurs du Mal," in it arise and flourish, in the form of acute sarcasm and a taste for mockery, all the sexual frustrations accumulated in a lifetime of obsessions and paranoia: homosexual fantasies mingle with the usual neuroses, in a hallucinatory combination of schizophrenic inability to manage one's emotions. But as much as it is a tragic and bitter experience, "Les Fleurs du Mal" is in its own way an album full of joy (!!!), a furious and incoherent manifestation of energies and repressed impulses suddenly resurfaced. "Les Fleurs du Mal" is elusive and unpredictable, precisely because it arises from an ambiguous emotional movement, traversed by pain (yes, because the journey to serenity is still long!), but that at times knows how to be tinged with irony, sarcasm (as if wanting to take a certain distance from its own sufferings) and even irreverence (especially in the unprecedented attack on the hypocritical and fake bourgeois conception of sexuality and love, as if finally perceiving criticalities outside one's Self, until a moment before severely targeted as the sole responsible for one's existential troubles).

A hint of the moods that will run through the work, we have moreover from the stamp "Heterosexual Advisory: Transgenital Content" that stands out on the cover.

Leafing through the booklet, we will also encounter texts to say the least explicit, such as that of "A Little Bar of Soap" (where our hero wants to be a small bar of soap to reach the most hidden and intimate places of the human body!), or in verses like "So, listen closely, girls and boys, this song is about HAEMORRHOIDS, not anyone's, but mine of course… a secret part I now disclose" (from "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood"), where the Gilbert Turko of "Querelle de Brest" (by Jean Genet) comes to mind, who, mocked by his comrades for being considered a fairy, finds solace in caressing his hemorrhoids, a changeable proof of his sexual integrity.

And the music? Well, I have to say that the first listen was a long 75-minute yawn!

From a stylistic point of view, in fact, the entity Sopor Aeternus takes a step back and returns to the skewed baroqueness of an album like "Es Reiten die Toten so Schnell," without however entirely renouncing what new had been introduced by "La Chambre d'Echo." Which would mean that even though electronic solutions are almost entirely set aside, the "poppy" spirit that characterized the breakthrough album is saved.

We thus find ourselves holding a sort of "dark/chamber pop" or, if preferred, a sort of "transsexual pop" exaggerated and exasperating, which stands at a level even more advanced than the already agonizing 80s gay-pop of various Marc Almond and Boy George.

Moreover, the reinterpretation of "Bitter Sweet" by Roxy Music remains the proof of a rapprochement to a kind of romantic wave of another era, re-read through the medieval sounds of the usual chamber ensemble: violas, violins, tubas, trombones, organ, and harpsichord thus go on to draw catchy, solemn, urgent melodies that paradoxically trace the melodic lines and catchiness of the great glories of the eighties (Depeche Mode and Duran Duran foremost). A consistently present and pulsating drum and bass provide a decent dynamism within the compositions, a characteristic already observed in recent works.

The only novelty introduced seems therefore to be the use of no less than two choirs: one composed of children and one of hefty men who, like Village People in a kitsch-gothic version, gurgle coquettishly and pompously, producing a deliberately comical effect.

From a strictly musical point of view, therefore, we find ourselves faced with the usual bell tolls, the usual country band fanfares, the usual acoustic instruments struggling with the same old riffs, but it is also true that the strictly musical dimension in Sopor Aeternus is the mere stage upon which Anna-Varney's tragic staging takes place. And thus, sustaining the game remains essentially the mad fluttering of that unique, androgynous, sexless, indefinable, exasperating voice, called to represent, each time, the squeaks of a child ("La Mort d'Arthur") as well as the cries of a ninety-year-old widow ("Les Fleurs du Mal").

A harrowing, ungraceful, hallucinated voice that sings its painful pop with piercing high notes ("Bitter Sweet"), heavy and trembling whimpers ("Always within the Hour"), sudden bursts of madness ("Helvetia Sexualis"). Without snubbing, obviously, those excesses and theatrical flair that have always distinguished the never-sober style of Sopor Aeternus (just abandon yourself to the thirteen minutes of the colossal "The Virgin Queen!").

All arranged and orchestrated with the usual professionalism.

So what is wrong, then? Essentially the fact that there remain 75 minutes of paranoia, cries, and hysterical screams; pieces of eight, ten, eleven, thirteen minutes, too long, too verbose not to at least muddle the balls a bit during listening. Pieces often very similar to each other, always over the top, but somewhat lacking in bite or moments that can remain in any way impressed in memory.

It's then bitter to note the definitive loss of the cryptic and arcane atmospheres that we had so appreciated in the past: no more, therefore, mounds of decaying bones, damp soils, tomb flowers, muddy catacombs, dead children, irreparable grief, and hopelessly unhappy lovers crying for eternity, but rather disproportionate dicks, beauty/ugliness products, perfumes based on real tears, creams that reduce penis size, flexible and tense muscles (well described "In der Palestra") and nonsense from a hysterical queer ("Some men can truly be like chocolate, but most of them are more like SHIT" proclaims "Some Men are like Chocolate").

For all these reasons, at first listening, we may remain somewhat perplexed, if not mortally bored or even disappointed. But Anna-Varney remains an artist who knows what she is doing and whose music exists because there are emotions to communicate. And so, armed with holy patience, and setting aside all the preconceptions tied to what Sopor Aeternus once was and is no longer today, we can, in the various listens we choose to dedicate to this "Les Fleurs du Mal," gradually capture new nuances: as always happens in Sopor Aeternus albums, the substance emerges in the long run, especially in "Les Fleurs du Mal," given the scale and quantity of sounds, solutions, details, suggestions, and passages to capture with attention, dedication, devotion.

An album less visionary, therefore, less extreme in the explicitness of pain, and more serene (so to speak) and relaxed in tone. A sincere album, born of an irreducibly mad and altered mind, which inevitably and faithfully represents yet another phase of the dizzying artistic and emotional journey of this unique and hallucinatory creature of the entire dark panorama.

So if we are distant from the fascinating and agonizing atmospheres of masterpieces like "Dead Lovers' Sarabande" parts one and two, there is to say that Anna-Varney does not disappoint but rather grows, evolves, transcends the gothic imagery to include new elements. In other words: advances in defining an increasingly original and outside-the-box music, which directly roots itself in the profound movements of a tormented and constantly mutating spirit.

"Les Fleurs du Mal" thus reunites with the broad and transversal branch of music of neurosis and pain. Of art that becomes self-analysis, refinement of oneself and the surrounding world, a mirror, and exorcism of its own psychic disturbances.

And we are already curious to see how the discourse will evolve in the future, and if perhaps in the next work, Anna-Varney will appear joyful and lively in the guise of a tender and innocent Pikachu!

Pika! Pika!