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TRAGIC BUT DANCEABLE, DANCEABLE BUT TRAGIC

With their seventh album, HIM avoids the pitfall of over-arranging but uses the choruses to full advantage. For Ville Valo, however, purposeful commerciality is best left to car salesmen.

Time flies, years pass, as the song goes [the song being a Christmas hymn called “Maa on niin kaunis”]. Time has flown also for HIM. When the new Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice album is released in February, HIM will be a band that has operated in three different decades. But is it a fact worth emphasizing? No, it isn’t, at least if you ask Ville Valo.

- You can speculate about things like that, but the fact is that if necessary you could find for every single day a meaning worth celebrating with 400 bottles of champagne. It’s better to focus on the future, the new album, Valo says emphatically.

If the band is focusing on the future, the lyrics of the new album are in the moment, not looking backward or forward.

- One clear guideline for making the lyrics was that they should be in the present tense. What happens, happens now, Valo clarifies.

The present tense doesn’t, however, anchor the character of Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice in the framework of today. The album doesn’t shy away from playing with the elements of the classic pop song.

- This kind of ideas just flowed, almost accidentally. Our goal was to reach the magical limit of 3.33 minutes with the songs; we wanted to include all the aspects of HIM in the framework it created. It’s an achievement of sorts to say what you want to say in that time, Valo says.

The album relies unashamedly on the 80’s sing-along exaggerations. Even the gay synths that were banned from Venus Doom (2007) make a visible or rather an audible return. If the reference points on the last round were Black Sabbath and Cathedral, now the conversation reverts to names such as The Cult, Brian Eno and Depeche Mode.

- All of us have grown up with hair metal and 80’s pop. The new album has a conscious dance-your-sorrows-away mood. I call its atmosphere melancholic lightheartedness. Danceable stuff, works in a bar, but with its own tragic element. And when it comes to danceable tragedy, Depeche Mode is a master at that, Valo characterizes.

The Cult worked as a basis on which the band, according to Valo, placed elements taken from Tim Burton’s world – seeing that Burton is an important figure for the singer himself and for keyboard player Burton. The conversation flows also to David Lynch.

- If Venus Doom was our Inland Empire, this new album is Blue Velvet. By the way, back in the day I went to see Blue Velvet without knowing anything about the movie. You can imagine what kind of an experience that was. I still haven’t had the courage to watch Inland Empire all the way through. Maybe someday I will.

Let’s hear some party drumming!

Even on the first listen, Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice reveals a precisely hitting catchiness. Those who dislike stuff filled with hooks may suffer from the hit overload the album offers -- that’s how efficiently every song continues to play in your head long after you heard it.

- Some have said that the album is purposefully commercial which I think is a bit absurd. Purposeful commerciality belongs more to, like, the car industry. In the end, music is customized for the tastes of its author while I doubt some Japanese guy is thinking about his own size when putting together a car, Valo ponders.

A bit baffling are also the comments that the new album is exactly like the old ones. Even though Valo doesn’t deny the existence of certain continuums.

- Acoustic Funeral, for example, is related to When Love and Death Embrace, a kind of a lullaby from hell. Love, the Hardest Way on the other hand is pure Right Here in My Arms style rock. And in a way a song like Scared to Death in its classic pop format is like Join Me. But we do have our own identity. For example Linde has his own sound, he can’t all of a sudden sound like The Edge.

Even though In the Arms of Rain starts with The Edge-like guitars.

- I was wondering whether you would bring that up. Yeah, there’s that, Valo laughs.

Of songs that go a bit more off the beaten track, Valo mentions the opening track In Venere Veritas and the heaviest track Ode to Solitude.

- Ode to Solitude is a kind of Metallica meets Fleetwood Mac meets Buffalo Springfield thing. It has its own weird genre. The drumming is sometimes very Lars Ulrich-like, but then there are blues elements. Ulrich, by the way, is an underappreciated drummer, an excellent drummer in his own niche, Valo praises.

On the album, there are also more modern, American-born rhythms that the band’s previous works don’t really include. Was this perhaps the influence of Matt Squire who has worked with new generation American bands?

- No, that came from the band itself. On the contrary, Matt made things more straightforward and insisted on more “party drumming”. But as far as those rhythms you mentioned are concerned, Dave Grohl is always a good reference point when it comes to the drums, Valo says.

Relax, don’t do it?

Squire emphasized keeping things straightforward and simple during the recording and kept in check the band that has sometimes succumbed to the temptation of over-arranging. Squire, who is an admirer of Brendan O’Brien’s work, was looking for a simple and organic soundscape. There was a place for frills, but Squire wanted to avoid stuffing them everywhere.

- Editing yourself is difficult. Sometimes you become blind to a good riff you have come up with, and you just think of all the extra stuff that you could cover it with. You have to find the kind of a Jackson-Pollock-in-sound method where you have the courage to experiment and splash stuff around, but you know how to separate the best splatters from the rest. Matt was excellent in that. He kept us concentrated while we were working, Valo praises.

Squire also shares the credit for HIM’s improved way of handling the choruses. At times Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice rises to such spheres of catchiness that the C sections are like second choruses.

- We have in the past perhaps gotten used to a certain kind of monotony, but Matt brought with him a new way of dealing with the choruses. We have never lacked in melodies, so we thought why not use the choruses to show what we can do.

Spiders also had a part to play in the making of the album. If one hadn’t bitten Linde, the final track The Foreboding Sense of Impending Happiness wouldn’t be nearly as Martin L. Gore-like as it is now.

- The song was supposed to be an interlude like Song or Suicide on the last album, but Linde’s hand was very swollen for a few days. And of course this happened just as we were supposed to record the song. But in the end it was a godsend. Matt and I had time to fool around with the song. Giorgio Moroder had a chance to lift his head, and the song became completely different from what we had planned, Valo says.

The final tracks of HIM’s albums have sometimes been a hint about the future direction of the band’s music. Like for example In the Nightside of Eden from Dark Light (2005).

- Yes, I guess it was a little more progressive, Valo interjects.

Yeah, it was. Could The Foreboding Sense of Impending Happiness be a hint of what’s to come?

- You can write that our next step from that would be Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which means that we can end the band right here, Valo laughs.

Okay. Before the end, the band will however play at least at the Sonisphere festival next summer. In the promotional poster, HIM’s name is at the top next to Iron Maiden’s and underneath it are, among others, Heaven & Hell, Alice Cooper, Slayer, and the aforementioned The Cult. How does that feel?

- Well, fucking wrong. And it’s a one-time thing, it can only happen here. More bands will be booked for that festival, more current stuff. All the ones mentioned are, if not old school, then super old school. It looks like we’re going to play on the same day as The Cult. You can guess whether I’m psyched about that, Valo enthuses.

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