HELSINGIN SANOMAT -INTERNATIONAL EDITION - CULTURE

HIM serve up their heaviest album yet
Venus Doom is expected to climb into the US Top 10


By Jussi Ahlroth

Ville Valo does not look like a man with great expectations weighing on his shoulders. The pressures stay beneath the surface, even though HIM's new Venus Doom album is supposed to to climb into the Top 10 in the United States lists, the superheavyweight category of global music markets.
Venus Doom is released today (14.9.) in Finland and Germany, and next week in other markets on both sides of the Atlantic. HIM's last release Dark Light made it to #18 on the Billboard Top 200 in its first week of release in October 2005. This time around, such numbers will not be regarded as doing the business.

And what are HIM doing about securing that elusive U.S. smash? A CD's worth of safe, guaranteed hits with single-appeal, to satisfy the needs of American FM radio?
Whoa. No way.
HIM's second album for the American Sire Records label, a Warner subsidiary, is the band's heaviest cut yet, in at least two senses.
The nine numbers included on the basic release are not three-minute airplay cuts, but long and complex. The sound is also a good deal heavier than has been heard from HIM before now.

Valo is quietly confident about the U.S. situation. "Advance orders for the new album are five times greater than for Dark Light", he reveals.
To a great extent, this is only the beginning, however. The buoyant advance orders are the work of Dark Light itself. Only when the sales spike of those fans who must get the new HIM material in the first week has passed will we see if this new release stays in the charts and if it will ultimately go gold in the U.S., as did Dark Light in 2005.
"But you have to remember that the Americans have a weird taste in music", says Valo, and of course he is right in his way. In the States such heavy and "difficult" bands as System of A Down or Tool sell by the truckload.

As the HIM composer, Valo has in Venus Doom made a bold leap into his own personal musical roots. And this time there are none of the stock references to "non-heavy" Finnish artists from the past such as Tapio Rautavaara or Rauli Badding.
No, here the focus is on doom-metal; heavy-as-lead and slower than other metal genres.
The names being dropped this time around are from the early and mid-1990s, from the margins of British and U.S. metal - Cathedral, Paradise Lost, Anathema, Type O Negative, Monster Magnet, My Dying Bride. And of course the big daddy of all doom-metal, the early Black Sabbath of the 1970s.
For his own part, Valo is pretty reluctant to use expressions like ‘back to the roots'. "It's such a fucking corny term."
He puts it differently, saying that the band wanted to make a more minimalist album this time out. Enough time has elapsed from the early ‘90s, when Valo himself was absorbing influences from the bands above and others like them.
"There is no way we could have pulled off that sort of thing at the time when Type O Negative came out with Bloody Kisses [released in 1993]. And you know, by the way, that there's plenty of people today who know nothing about that band, or about the Swedish band Candlemass or Paradise Lost, even. If we had come out with this sort of material at the same time as them, it would just have come across like a rip-off."

The album is certainly not minimalistic, either.
"There are only nine tracks on here, but there is more happening than on any of our previous records - for instance in terms of time-signatures and tempo changes. But at the same time it has a more rugged, spare sound."
Dark Light had been produced with a rich sound-palette, full of little details.
"That was kind of our "ear-candy" approach to making music, like with a humungous amount of stuff going on . I was in the studio the whole time with an acoustic guitar and wondering what we could put in here or there or there. But when you have too many contrasting counter-melodies running all over the place, then the original riff gets drowned out."

And guitar riffs are very much at the core of Venus Doom. This is very definitely a guitar album, written for the electric guitar, and with less of a role given to the band's keyboards sound.
Thus far, HIM's numbers have been pretty traditional in terms of the standard pop and rock format. This approach has been thrown out of the window on Venus Doom, replaced by a variety of forms and guitar shapes that are more charactersitic of mainstream metal music.
The stronger guitar format is in part a reflection of the band's circumstances when they went into the studio. When rehearsals got under way, keyboards player Janne "Burton" Puurtinen had just become a father. Valo played guitar along with bassist Mikko "Mige" Paananen and drummer Mika "Kaasu" Karppinen.

The album's production was primarily the responsibility of Tim Palmer.
Hiili Hiilesmaa was also involved, and the two sets of ears apparently complemented one another well, at least in Valo's opinion.
Hiilesmaa, who has also been responsible for recordings by Apocalyptica and The 69 Eyes, has a characteristic rough-edged style that leans towards overkill, while Palmer has softened it somewhat.
And this time Villa Valo let them get on with it. He didn't sit in the studio tweaking arrangements the whole time: "I just sat in the bar."

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.9.2007


Previously in HS International Edition:
HIM-fever in the United States (18.10.2005)

"That was kind of our "ear-candy" approach to making music, like with a humungous amount of stuff going on . I was in the studio the whole time with an acoustic guitar and wondering what we could put in here or there or there. "

i hope Ville didn't listen to all the stupid people saying that DL was 'gay'. i hope he made this album doomier because he REALLY felt like it and consented it to be so, not only because he wanted the world to see how heavy HIM can get.