One of the great tragic moments in Western literature is the drowning of Ophelia in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet. Spurned by the Danish prince for reasons she cannot fathom, Ophelia falls into an oubliette of despair. Abandoned by love, she casts herself into the river. The image of the desolate girl lost under the water is an enduring images of the hazards of the Romantic Ideal: love kills as surely as poison or a sword. Peccatum's Lost in Reverie follows Ophelia into the water, caught up in the tangled web of unfinished garlands and her floating hair.
Peccatum is the project of Ihriel and Ihsahn, Norwegian children of the black symphonic metal scene whose previous entry in the orchestral noir genre was the stunning Iter.viator (under Ihriel's nom de plume, Star of Ash). Lost in Reverie begins with the fading thoughts of Ophelia as she slips into the stream and then dissolves itself into an avant-garde meditation on the dissolution of thought, hope, spirit, and unrequited love. Peccatum uses orchestral strings, lachrymose arias, guttural black metal voices, cacophonous bursts of chaotic instrumentation, delicate piano melodies, bombastic guitar breakdowns: the list gets absurdly endless. Lost in Reverie captures the fading confusion of thought and emotion as the heart slows to a dead stop. "Swift chill of desolation," Ihriel sings in the dying moments of "Desolate Ever After," "and the sadness affixes itself to decay."
"In the Bodiless Heart" revolves in an infinite whirlpool where the heart still exists as Idea, as a beating object that fuels desire, but without any physical body to which it can attach this passion. "He cannot see where the lights END / Where he ENDS / Or if they know where they END," Ihsahn sings in the electric chorus. The foundation of "In the Bodiless Heart" is an acoustic piece for guitar, bass, and sparse drum kit and, while the chorus is a growling, electrified waterspout, the piece moves like gentle water in an eternal circle, cycling back on its itself with its energies unrealized.
In direct contrast is "Parasite My Heart" which explodes in a black metal tornado (propelled into existence by Ihsahn's old school Emperor-style howl). "Corrupted desolation / The sound of glass between teeth / I belch the suicide of guilt." And, as the fury breaks and the song becomes a slow lament with Ihriel and a grand piano, you understand that the blast of sound at the beginning of the song is the fury of a heart that has been betrayed, that has been cast aside like a used fruit rind. "Naked body on display," Ihriel sings mournfully, "Parasite my heart / and the immensity where it dies." If "In the Bodiless Heart" was the external vision of the lost heart disappearing beneath the endless river of souls, then "Parasite My Heart" is the howl of unrequited fury which keeps it alive even as the body decays and dies. Ihsahn's naked howl returns in "Black Star," the ultimate resting place for all fading dreams and desires, the place where his cries are the terminal gasp of a fading dream. Ihriel's gentle croon -- "I am the Black Star / Hostess of your dead heart's hymn" -- is the dark embrace that enfolds the lost soul as the final chamber fills and -- gone, gone, gone -- the love is finally extinguished. ("Night is within me / And I am here in your arms," Ihriel sings on the final track of the record, "The Banks Of This River Is Night.")
Ihsahn and Ihriel are genre-busting, cutting themselves free of the constraints of modern classifications in order to fully explore the melancholia of death and the liquid despair of lost hope. "The swimmer can swim / A thousand lengths," sings Ihsahn in "Veils of Blue," "clockwise and reverse / I cannot swim in you." The duo trade off lyrical phrases like poet and muse talking back and forth, like loved and lover whispering back and forth. "Veils of Blue" inhabits the same underwater grotto lounge space of "In the Bodiless Heart," and if Ihsahn is the crooner on stage, then Ihriel haunts the wings and the fly space above the stage, lost in the lichen covered rocks of the cavern, her voice an echoing wail.
Ophelia dies off-stage, and her death is overshadowed by the aftermath of the watery suicide: her death pushes Laertes to challenge Hamlet to a duel and allows Claudius the opportunity to have the young man slay his son-in-law with impunity. It becomes just a cause for the gory end, a twist of the key which unlocks the door for Death to claim everyone. But, as Ihsahn and Ihriel remind us through Lost in Reverie, Ophelia (like all of us) loved -- desperately, earnestly, completely -- and, with that love spurned and rejected, she found there was nothing left to keep her afloat. Despair is not naturally buoyant and sometimes it is a long way to the bottom of the river. All the way down, your heart keeps circulating hope and desire; your heart keeps feeling until it beats no longer. Lost in Reverie is the sound of love drowning.
Gertrude: ...Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Laertes: Alas, then she is drown'd?
Gertrude: Drown'd, drown'd.
Laertes: Too much water has thou, poor Ophelia.
[Hamlet, IV.vii.176-185]