HIM - 'Love Metal' (BMG)
1/5
By: Thomas Hannan
There is always, always a place in everyone's record collection for some unashamedly over-the-top heavy metal. An album, such as 'Love Metal', with song-titles such as 'Endless Dark' and 'Circle Of Fear', packaged all in black apart from one big ominous pentagram staring you right in the face. Alright, so already you might not want to take it entirely seriously, but on first glance HIM could turn out to be quite a bit of satanic fun if nothing else.
Then there arrives an unnerving twist in this eerie tale. This is an album, pretty much from beginning to end, about love; yes, the crappy feeling that emotional teenagers get that makes them waste all their money and write bad poetry. Even that pentagram on the front has been distorted into the shape of - wait for it - a 'heartagram' (their words, not ours). And all this coming from a band whose name stands for 'His Infernal Majesty', too... Where did it all go wrong?
You get the feeling those Finnish rockers HIM could actually rock pretty hard if they wanted to, and that's what makes 'Love Metal' all the more frustrating. There's only really one moment on the whole album, the opening few bars of 'Soul On Fire', that make you want to put your fingers into that inimitable 'rock' shape and throw them to the sky. The rest, it has to be said, is just far too mild and safe. And there lies the problem - if this is metal, for crying out loud, who ever wanted inoffensive metal?
Similarly, the collective product is over-produced to the point of being stripped of all its potential guts. Even when vocalist Ville Valo is shouting about being buried alive and 'the guilt that will follow us to death' it's in a voice so processed, so sweet and innocent that it's hard to imagine he's ever contemplated anything quite so devilish. On the first half of the record, there are at least some memorable tunes that HIM's unsurprisingly devotional fan-base will welcome with open arms. But as side two unfurls, if you didn't know who was behind all this overly nondescript posturing, you wouldn't call a liar anyone telling you this was Nickelback or, heaven forbid, Creed.
'Love Metal' could have gone two ways towards improvement. It either needs to be far more minimal, losing things such as unnecessary piano and mandolin playfulness to create a far more affecting, raw and introspective dictation of dynamics. On the other hand, and perhaps a much more exciting if increasingly humorous prospect, it could have taken the whole overblown rock opera stance it hints at quite often (especially on the frankly ridiculous likes of 'Fortress Of Tears') and really ran with it... If you're going to be an over-the-top metal band, make damn sure you're the most insanely over-the-top metal band in existence. If you don't, there's a chance you'll end up in the same unfortunate rut 'Love Metal' settles within - somewhere between tedious and uninspired.
Artists in this article: HIM
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