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Rating: If, usually, those who massively focus on image do so to patch up a not-so-overflowing creativity, in the case of Sopor Aeternus, we can truly call it an exception. Never before in this case, in fact, does form coincide with substance, the horror and repulsion that stem from the iconography adopted by this artist (I will use the masculine for convenience, since it is not clear whether it is a male or a female) merge with the horror and repulsion evoked by the equally terrible images called forth by this distressing and anguished music.
Identity crisis, disintegration of the self, rejection of self and one's body, fear and need of others, solitude as a sentence to serve and at the same time as ultimate consolation and escape from a hostile world, desire for Death, understood as peace of the senses, annihilation of perceptions and thus as the only refuge from the inevitable pain that life brings with it. An infinite sadness, almost cosmic, that stems from the travails of the soul and goes on to envelop the entire universe with its overflowing and uncontainable pain. Everything is extremized, bordering on the grotesque and the farce, filtered through learned literary references, Greek mythology, and popular folklore, carried forward with a conceptual coherence and awareness that terrifies, making us convinced that it's not just a pose aimed at winning the favor of some teenager in search of strong sensations.
Even if with this "Songs from the Inverted Womb" one doesn't reach the intensity and elegance achieved with the previous "Dead Lover's Sarabande" parts one and two, the qualitative level of the product remains stellar. Certainly, fans of the band will not be disappointed, nor will those who love more cryptic and decadent atmospheres.
From a strictly musical standpoint, the work, extremely polished and inspired (but how could it be otherwise?), goes on to smooth and bring to further levels of agony that sort of horrific chamber music that has been perfected album by album, until the formal peak reached in the two aforementioned episodes.
The sound gains in compactness, aiming at the essential, and to bear witness to a much richer and more varied past (from the dark origins to the openings to folk, medieval, and ethnic sounds of the mid-works), remain only the somewhat baroque arrangements, the funeral toll of the bells, the mournful march of the violas, violins, and trombones. The guitar, the last bastion of a folk past, is here totally eliminated, but on the other hand, the Ensemble of Shadows is enriched by a flesh-and-blood drummer, which gives the tracks more dynamism.
There is an impression that with this operation of subtraction the music wants to detach definitively from any "earthly" contamination, and aim at a metaphysical, mystical, intangible dimension, outside of time and musical genres, where the only points of reference can be the apocalyptic atmospheres of the black priestess Nico and the neurotic, anguished singing of Rozz Williams from Christian Death, always sources of inspiration for the project.
But the agony theater that Anna/Varney can conjure is truly something that goes beyond the dark art of the above-mentioned characters, a dreadful performance that transcends the strictly musical dimension, to become an experience halfway between a psychoanalytic session and a seance, a kind of transference of pain into pain, where strong analogies with Butoh, the hallucinatory Japanese dance to which the artist has also been inspired iconographically, can be found: in the same way the body, not without effort, twists, crawls on the ground, writhes, occupying and making its own the surrounding space, the agonizing and anguished singing of Anna/Varney performs unnatural evolutions aimed at painting symbolic inner landscapes, weaving a web capable of enveloping the listener and leading them to other, dark places, where there is no light nor hope. Where Death, as the lyrics of "Résumé" describe, is even a luxury ("How I wish that I was dead and rest in final peace. . . but even the luxury of death can’t cure the wounds time cannot heal...").
The spectrum of emotions described here, as might be expected, oscillates from black to dark gray, from agony to despair, through madness, to resignation and abandonment to one's own evil and pain. A gloomy, estranging atmosphere, at times disturbing, at times mysterious. And then that voice, undefinable, ambiguous, androgynous, asexual, seeming to come from another world. Harsh cries, mournful chants, subdued sobs: a vocal performance not measured in octaves but in degrees of despair.
If the theme of the already mentioned two chapters of "Dead Lover’s Sarabande" was Love (tormented love, of course, the unrequited, the lost, the one that leads to solitude and the bites of an inconsolable suffering), in this "Songs from Inverted Womb" the recurring theme since the times of "Todeswunsch" returns: the desire for Death.
The inverted womb, in fact, does not only constitute yet another allusion to the sexual ambiguity (not only psychic, but also physical, according to certain sources) that has always been the project's underlying obsession. The inverted womb is also, symbolically, the place where life ends. If indeed the womb is the antechamber of life, the comfortable place where there is not yet pain and affliction, its opposite is certainly the grave, seen as a final refuge where to find peace and tranquility (a concept that will be surpassed, negatively of course, with the subsequent "Es Reiten die Toten so Schnell," where even an eternity of Non-death is hypothesized, through the symbolism of the vampire, where peace will never be achieved, and where, as a track states: "The silence of the graves is not silence at all").
Life, therefore, as a condemnation and not as a gift. A premise from which stems a vision of the Mother that has nothing to do with the common conception that sees her as the giver of life, to whom we owe everything, but rather portrays her as the creator of all evils, the one who brings us into the world and condemns us to the sufferings of life. And it is precisely the Mother, or rather the traumatic parent-child relationship (autobiographical references are not excluded) that becomes one of the main themes of the album. Thus says the introductory "Something Wicked this Way Comes": "Maybe this is the saddest story, it is full of pain and hurt, because, of all the names and phrases of this mortal world, there is only one that I fear more than any other, and this most terrifying term is the one of Mother".
The overturning of the value relationship "birth-death", the theme of childhood, the inverted Oedipal conflict become the true thread that links the different tracks, a conviction corroborated by the unsettling dedication of the album: "Dedicated to the Memory and the Resurrection of Little Seven, who died at the age of six".
A world, therefore, populated by children who exasperatedly kill their mother ("There was a Country by the Sea"), fathers who kill their own children ("Saturn Devouring his Children"), small white coffins with easily imaginable contents ("Tales from the Inverted Womb"). Noteworthy is the heartbreaking prayer of "...And Bringer of Sadness", in which a sobbing voice asks its god to end its life, the desolate revisit of "May I Kiss your Wounds?" (already present in "The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller", here rearranged with the piano) and the already mentioned "There was a Country by the Sea", the peak of the album (if not of the entire career): eleven terrible minutes in which, in a theatrical and visionary way, a truly macabre story unfolds, worthy of the best Edgar A. Poe.
The only flaw of the album that can be found might be an undeniable heaviness linked to the themes, certainly not cheerful (which forces one to touch wood from the first to the last instant), and to the excessively oppressive and redundant atmospheres, which go well beyond the canons of gothic music, and that can make the listening quite challenging (also given the extended bulk of the album, which reaches nearly eighty minutes).
Definitely recommended for those who think "the more death, the better".
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