I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Your Body is a Temple." It's said so often and in so many different contexts that the expression has essentially lost all meaning. Like, does it just mean that you're not supposed to get a tattoo or else you'll upset your mother, or rather that you're supposed to be open for visitation at regular hours on evenings and weekends? It's unclear how far we can stretch the metaphor while maintaining credulity, but something like the latter is the inspiration for Petra Hermanova first solo record under her own name, In Death's Eyes. Ascending through the conference of her famed autoharp and a breathtaking bellow of a church organ, she makes her body and voices a sight through which to recognize and reconcile one's self with grief, loss, dying, and redemption. Fully exposing herself through the expression of religious hymns, mountain folk, and droning swaths of feedback, which are part doom metal rumble and part wordless psalm, she makes flesh a dream of transcendence beyond the anguish of the many slow deaths that we suffer before the final extinguishment. She gives herself over to the listener in a kind of eucharist, healing with purpose through the shaking loose of fear and the release of the frozen shrowd that weighs down the soul with the debt of regrets and a pride that foils our attempts to accept the potential for dispensation. The album ends with a bell tolling, and I ask you, for whom does it ring if not the imp that lives inside you, the one which turns the vice of self-spiting anger, a petty creature who can be dislodged from his perch through the bodily vibrations of song and pervasive quiver of sound, affirmations which give succor to the soul and confirm that you are blessed with both the passion and the strength to go on living.
* March is the Spring Colors Challenge, where I am writing a new album review each day inspired by a different color. Today's color, liquid lavender, had me hunting for a liturgical sounding record which I thankfully found in Petra Hermanova's LP.
