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Words: Pal Travers
FINNISH GOTH ROCKERS REFINE THEIR OWN FORMULA.


VENUS DOOM, we were promised by talismanic HIM frontman Ville Valo, would be the band's heaviest album yet. Certainly it's a more compact effort than 2005's worldwide breakthrough album Dark Light-if "compact" can be correctly applied to a work boasting a sprawling 10-minute epic with the suitably grand-morose title Sleepwalking Past Hope, that is. The keyboards, while still an effectively atmospheric presence, have been toned down from overkill to merely ubiquitous while the guitars have swollen proportionally to balance this gap.
Valo is, of course, the face and soul as well as the mere voice of HIM but six-stringer Mikko "Linde" Lindström has been at its heart since its cover band inception and this time out he does get to stamp his mark quite heavily on proceedings. The riffs - still cribbed from classic rock tablature before being coated with that dark glam-goth patina - are well to the fore, while Linde's occasionally turbulent solos are the nearest HIM come to chaos, bristling with the potential of an individual who could well explode yet keeps it reigned in for the good of the team.
In the context of HIM's back catalogue then, yes this is heavy. It is all relative however, and Valo's more outlandish claims that the album would fall somewhere between Master of Puppets and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless prove only that artistes should rarely be relied upon to describe their own work. The only thing this sounds like is HIM, but that's certainly no bad thing. Few bands have such a cohesive, instantly recognizable yet comparatively unrestricted identity to work within. The slickly atmospheric, breathlessly dynamic likes of Passion's Killing Floor or Dead Lovers' Lane could really have originated from no other band yet there's still room for the unexpected twist. The aforementioned Sleepwalking Past Hope strikes one extreme, Doors-style psychedelia and all, while the minute-long Song Or Suicide, sounding something like a lost campfire gem from a goth Johnny Cash, marks the other.
Venus Doom, then, tweaks the formula slightly but it presents no radical departure and thank all the nether gods for that. The Finns have spent a long time honing, refining, getting great at what they do and this is the darkly pulsing result.


Find this as well as Tales From The Studio in the current edition of Kerrang! on sale now.