Heavenly Voices
(Hyperium)
by Jamie Kiffel
Pink and gold silk billows up on a warm wind and flutters across an open field of burnt-out wheat. Riding the tissue silk wave are these many-voiced fairies, Ophelias, and Cupid’s Psyches sighing as their sweethearts, stained with spilled candle wax, wave them away. Discovered night lovers evaporate.
“You still reign over me,” gently sings Emma Holmer of Mine, backed by a ticking clock; Single Gun Theory mellifluously mourns, “Through the years, carry the pain of our survival;” Within Temptation‘s high range water nymph cries, “All of my life I gave to you” over a low male chorus, spinning into Irish ghost lai lai lai’s. Love Spirals Downwards evokes echoing museum halls with a heartbeat back beat and percussion-like vocals. Siddal is as cotton-voiced hyper spacey as ever with “Just Around the Corner,” but surrounded by a resounding room of other bandwomen’s nymphic plaints, this airy track feeds easily into the disc’s prismatic vision of long-haired mythic maidens twisted into trees and reborn as rhododendrons.
A waiting piano bides its time with slow arpeggios as The Gathering‘s sweetly atonal vocals (“You have forsaken me”) might be Mary’s own gentle mourning to God, for His treatment of her son. Stella Maris races like Artemis rushing the woods on a tribal drumbeat, invoking the goddess’ night powers. Rose Chronicles sweetly sing a light howl of “Blood Red;” The Moors draw up Celtic spirits with elegiac Gaelic recitation and chant over solemn tambourine and drum. Spanish flavor via classical guitar shifts the sound, goddess-like, courtesy of Aurora Sutra; feminism gets a spike in with Lacuna Coil, who assert in chest voice, “I just wanna be myself… I don’t wanna die.” Cliffside wind fantasies blow out on the high-whistling voices of Liv Kristine, who sing against a low, grumbling boom, like crumbling rocks thousands of miles down. Das Zeichen is so church nave ethereal with “Douh-Sah-Ra” that even with its rising Arabic rhythm, it threatens hopelessness (imagine a gypsy funeral).
Chimes close this lost-lady lament, as Essences rise to vague promises of major key hopes, as if Odysseus’ patient wife spies, in her near-blind blue eyes, her husband’s sails finally approaching shore. But are those his so-long awaited masts on the horizon, or has her neglected mind, left alone to turn inside itself, collapsed to where it now sees only the whiteness of her own brain?
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