Within the Mist of Sorrow by Vanha is a musical and lyrical attempt to make depression congruent with its theme: to give expression to one’s own depression and to offer the suffering and isolated other individual a possibility of recognition in the other. It is an invitation to break through emotional isolation, to transform it into a sense of shared experience, and to accept the self in its vulnerability, fragility, and fragmentation even in the state of deep depression.
The mind behind the Swedish project Vanha, Jan “Janne” Johansson, picks up the musical thread of groups such as Katatonia, My Dying Bride, Anathema, Saturnus, and Shape of Despair. Accordingly, Vanha condenses the melancholic aspect of melodic death doom, gothic metal, and funeral doom into an independent creative expression devoted to depression in its different nuances. The music is melodic and heavy with sorrow, permeated by a lonely, mourning violin and sluggish piano lines that seem to lie lost in space. These elements mark the hope for redemption—or ceremonially welcome the end of life. Slowly, an emotional heaviness pours forth from weighty riffs and slow rhythms, creating a ground on which one can recognize and accept one’s own grief.
Confront the self or retreat into superficiality
The lyrics do not draw a perspective out of the state of depression, but rather point inward into one’s own darkness—as a part of the self that must be accepted and acknowledged. Johansson formulates the universal feeling of hopelessness in the entropic presence of the world-without-us, the il y a, with the words: “There comes a time for us all / When light no longer exists.” (Old Heart Fails). To this sense of hopelessness in view of the cosmological darkness of the world-without-us (Thacker) and the accompanying insignificance of the self within it, Johansson does not oppose a path of overcoming. Instead, he calls for the ominously welcoming acceptance of entropy as part of reality—an attitude that Justine brings toward the apocalypse in Melancholia. Suffering, darkness, and the final entropy of all being are not merely to be accepted as inevitable—they are to be welcomed.
Søren Kierkegaard describes precisely those moments of despair in which the individual becomes aware of the existential abysses of freedom and finitude as moments in which the individual must choose whether to confront the self or retreat into superficiality. Within the Mist of Sorrow situates itself at precisely this point of existential decision. With the sound of a crackling radio, clearly spoken, Johansson offers the advice: “Embrace the darkness.” (Old Heart Fails).
What follows is the confrontation with one’s own mortality and the emptiness that often accompanies depressive states. From the apocalyptic wish for an end in Into the Cold Light to various stages of suffering, Johansson articulates the feeling of being overwhelmed by darkness. In this confrontation with the abyss of life, Kierkegaard suggests that the individual must arrive at a decision regarding the continuation of life—or its end.
Without romanticizing or heroizing the experience, pain, loss, and grief are portrayed and acknowledged as a path of life. Happiness, however—much as in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre or in the film The Hours—is not an ultimate goal or state of being, but rather a brief flare in the darkness that the human being must recognize before it fades again.
“I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I… I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more…never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.”
(Michael Cunningham: The Hours )
In the piece Dark Heart, the different aspects of the album converge, addressing both the pain of losing human connection and the hints of happiness embedded between the lines in retrospective glimpses of shared moments from the past. The feeling of losing former happiness, the loneliness growing out of grief, and the powerlessness to escape this emotional landscape accumulate into a general expression of suffering. Kierkegaard emphasizes that this existential pain is an unavoidable part of human life—one that can simultaneously enable self-knowledge and moments of transcendence. Dark Heart reflects this dynamic by moving between painful, intense passages and quieter, more contemplative sections.
In the album’s finale, the hinted dissolution of the self in suicide forms a symbolic conclusion to the struggle against darkness. The acceptance and recognition of the end as part of the process of life, demanded at the beginning of the album, finds its resolution here. It is a resigned acceptance of passing away, without placing the desire for redemption or consolation at the center. Kierkegaard assumes a human condition in which, in the face of death and despair, the individual must make an existential decision—a decision that is not answered by external sources of consolation or religion, but by confronting one’s own finitude and suffering.
Acceptance
As a cathartic work that not only offers listeners space for grief but also a possibility of identification and acceptance of their own inner struggles, Within the Mist of Sorrow opens a path for engaging with one’s own existential crisis—and thus enables a form of redemption in the acceptance of one’s own pain.
