On their eighth studio album Tears On Tape, the Finnish dark rockers HIM focus on old values. With at times cocky punk attitude, the Quintett captures the fun frontman Ville Valo, guitar player Mikko “Linde” Lindström, bass player Mikko “Migé Paananen, keyboarder Janne “Burton” Puurtinen and drummer Mika “Gas” Karppinen still feel after two decades in the business. We met Ville and Migé at Berlin in early March.
It really is a bit hectic: Ville and Migé landed in the capital only this morning and the two HIM musicians only have two days of their trip to our realm to explain their new album to the German press. “It used to be different”, Migé knows.”I can remember that we spent an entire week for promotion in Germany back in the day and travelled around by train.” But whereas it was common in those days to visit the journalists in Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Berlin, nowadays everything is centered in one place. While we wait with the bass player in the corridor in front of the hotel room, Ville fights with the pitfalls of technology. The phone doesn’t function properly and cuts the musician off the line during his phone calls. At least the balcony door can be opened at last that had bothered Ville additionally. It is well known that with the singer, no interview is possible without cigarette breaks. Nevertheless, the Finns are in a good mood. No surprises there, after all they had enough downtime during the last years, and there never had been a longer time between two HIM studio releases. The predecessor, Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice was already released over three years ago.
Time to Unwind
“When you had a hit back in the day, it was: stay with it, stay with it, stay with it! Under that pressure, many a band split because the musicians were totally burned out at the end of the day,” Ville is sure. “Even if they reunited later, they weren’t as interesting as they had been before. Everybody only has a certain quantity of talent. If you fritter it away, then that’s it. Because you know, you can’t go to a shop and subsequent purchase talent.” From that discovery, Ville also drew a lesson for HIM. “If we learned anything over the years, then it’s that you have to allow yourself time to relax,” he tries to explain the longevity of the band which celebrated its 20th anniversary. “Of course it sounds ridiculous at first when a band takes a time-out for several months, but it’s essential to recharge one's batteries. Touring endlessly is no solution, Led Zeppelin already proved that. They only used to tour for two, three weeks at a time. Just listen to their improvisations on the bootlegs! They sound so incredibly fresh - because they were that to the band, too! The counterexample are Turbonegro. They used to support Queens Of The Stone Age in the US and additionally played headline shows. All in all it were 32 shows in 31 days, if I’m not mistaken - and that in America, where the geographical distances are huge! Of course the band still exists with a new singer, but their grand phase lasted comparatively short. We like what we do, and that’s why we’re happy that we could keep our band alive for so long.”
Innovation with Caution
The Finns’ longevity is not least due to the fact that they have never totally left their musical path of their past successes, but added something unique to every new record. “Exactly,” says Migé. “It’s important to reinvent yourself constantly, but you mustn’t be too venturous.” On Tears On Tape, too, old meets new. On the record label’s despatch note, they describe the new album as a mix of the movies Rambo and The English Patient. At the same time, frontman Ville describes himself as a “folk singer that does a metal band”. Say what?! “That should express the balance it’s about this time,” Ville explains. “On a lot of our earlier albums, there were the more hard rock, Rambo songs on one hand and then on the other hand the soft Th English Patient songs. This time, we tried to unite those both sides in every single song. That’s something we’d never tried to do in the past. There are really rough guitar riffs but in the same track simultaneously those 60’s Crooner melodies. That came about because I wrote those songs only with the acoustic guitar. Then I took the skeletal versions to the rehearsal place and we got stuck into them together. We already tried something similar in the past, but got stuck in the sentimentality of the tracks. When a number was poppish, we even emphasised that. This time, we focused on the bang-your-heads-to-the-wall parts instead.”
Previously, too, HIM never made big plans concerning the implementation of an album but did have a clear idea about which direction they’d take. This time, seemingly, the band was “found” by their new orientation. That Ville composed solely with the acoustic was far from conceptual, but chiefly due to drummer Gas’ nerve disease on his hands which immobilised him for several months and made it necessary for the frontman to improvise. “ I don’t believe in master plans as far as music in concerned,” Ville underlines. “But of course we don’t have somthing like guidelines, of example what direction we want to take: no Reggae, for example!” Does the band have to discuss things like that explicitly after twenty shared years? “Oh yes,” Migé grins. “You ought to think for example that you don’t have to mention that you better shouldn’t masturbate in a plane. Nevertheless, some do.” - “After I strummed to acoustic guitar and acted the sappy, whiny folk singer, the the other, elemental, animalistic side looked for an outlet,” Ville continues. “So we just cranked up the amps and played as loud as possible. After we had some riffs, we had a look if there were parts in my songs that fit to them. That’s what created this Ying-Yang thing which constitutes the songs. Sometimes you have the feeling that a part actually doesn’t fit in - but for some mysterious reasons it sounds great nevertheless!”
With Body and Soul
It does sound great. And, as far as guitars are concerned, also often pleasantly rough and infinitely forceful. “We recorded a lot of stuff with old school amps, because we looked for this noisy, punkish angularity,” Ville says. “ A lot of songs are so melodic that they dearly need that rough side, otherwise the album would have sounded to smoothly polished. To keep that balance is a walk on a tightrope.” The aim of the band was to combine the guitars’ feedback with silken sung words that take the listener to a place Ville compares with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: A place where everything technically seems perfectly normal but there is something extramundane, strange about it. In the past, HIM might have resorted to keyboards to gain that effect, this time the band took a different approach. “This record contains less keyboards than ever before,” Ville explains. “A lot of the parts that you think are keyboards are actually ebow guitars. They create this reverb-filled Daniel Lanois atmosphere.” But that was not the only sonic trick. They also gave a different sound to the drums this time. “Usually, we record the drums in a large room,” Ville says. “But this time, we wanted that bone-dry 70’s sound, so we took extra lousy microphones to make the sound nice and distorted. Seen individually, it’s all just little details, but when you pile them up, they do create a different sound. There is that lovely expression: ‘Passionately, with body and soul.’ That’s what we wanted to implement. Of course the record is well produced and mastered, but you downright feel that energy. That’s become scarce these days, because when you use pro tools and start to move around single parts to perfect them, a lot it lost in process. Tim Palmer, who mixed the record, said something really nice: ‘When you reach the chorus today, it sets in on exactly the same beat. Back in the day, it was all a bit less precise.’ It was only milliseconds, but that’s exactly what makes the whole thing sound bigger. All those little fuck-ups are great. You could say: For years, we’ve been on the quest for perfect imperfection.”
Insane Impulsive Actions
There’s something else that is new: Joining the regular songs for the first time on a HIM record, there are small, deliberately strange interludes. “They should give variety and raise a few eyebrows while listening,” Ville explains. “Just listen to the regular tracks would surely not be boring, too, but it would cause a certain confusion because of all the information the listener is assailed by.” The interludes give the audience a chance to catch a breath. Ville doesn’t tell whether the decision to take the foot off the pedal from time to time was planned or or rather an impulsive action, but he reveals laughing that he did follow some intuitions while recording: “The most wacky one being that we actually only had 12 songs, but I totally wanted to have 13 because I like the number better! That’s how Trapped In Autumn came about. During mixing I remembered that I had recorded eight hours of street noise in room 332 in the Marquis hotel in L.A. some time ago. And there was as well a recording of me on the piano, tinkering about with a riff that never worked out and one where I mess around with synths. We jumbled them all up and this weird psychedelic something eventuated.” -- “The origin story might be questionable, but I think the song renders a special touch to the album,” Migé is sure. While Trapped In Autumn is more of a heave-ho action, Ville worked on the title track, which was also pre-released as a single, over two years. “At the first moment, you ask yourself ‘Tears on Tape?’ What the hell should that be about? To me, it’s quite simple,” the frontman explains. “To me, it’s all the tears musicians have shed while they wrote the songs. WIth a painter,l it would be Tears On Canvas. It’s the tears they shed to feel better, it’s the milestones in music that help you to also get through darker days.” You can see: while HIM changed musically, they remain true to their topics, already song titles like No Love, Drawn & Quartered or When Love Starts To Die tell that much.
Concentrating on the Nitty-Gritty
But the dark-tinged lyrics aren’t the only link to the past. After the last album was recorded with a new producer in L.A., HIM entrenched themselves this time in Finnfox Studios in their hometown Helsinki, also also the man on the man behind the mixing desk was an old acquaintance: Hiili Hiilesmaa already looked after a round handful of HIM albums in the past. “Sometimes it’s good to proceed to an unknown situation, to produce different ideas. When you play it safe, it gets boring,” Ville says. “But this time, we consciously recorded with our own equipment in a room we already knew. To put it differently: It simplifies a lot of things when you don’t have to search for the toilet in the first place. This time, we could concentrate on the nitty-gritty straight away. We knew how the studio sounds, and because we did want to try out a lot of things that was a huge advantage. Because we know Hiili very well as well, work went a lot faster than last time.” But that doesn’t mean that the band will tend to play it safe in future. For instance, Ville wants to record an album in a fast-paced city like London or New York. Indeed, the band had ogled the Electric Lady Studio in New York for the recordings of Tears On Tape before they settled for home ground. “Both scenarios have their advantages,” believes Ville. “In the end, you can flip a coin to decide which way to take. We cast away the idea to record somewhere else when we came to realise that we would already be away from home long enough with the oncoming tour. That’s why it was important for us to at least mix the record somewhere different. That’s how we got to the Assault And Battery Studio in London which is run by Flood and Alan Moulder.”
Hits for the Band Members
Certainly, plummeting demand and the resulting declining significance of single sales play a role in the development of an album. The record companies’ pressure on the bands to produce single has somewhat lessened these days. “And apart from that, you never know anyway what becomes a hit when you work on new material,” says Ville. “It’s far more important that the songs are hits for the band members themselves because you know, we are the broken jukebox that has to play them on concerts for months! So it’s important to be selfish in that point instead of sitting in front of the radio and trying to guess what people might like. Especially in our case, that would just be a disaster, because aside from being dishonest, it would also not challenge us. Of course we can’t free ourselves from the songs we watch and listen to in the radio or on TV and YouTube. Very deep inside, we’re influenced by Lady Gaga, even if you, it goes without saying, don’t listen to it.
Social networks? No thank you.
Nevertheless, Ville tries to consciously cut himself off the lures of the modern media overkill. “I can proudly say that I do not care two figs about online social networks,” he declares grinning. “Today it’s a duty to have an email address for your work but I even didn’t have one of those until 2004. The people that were in a hurry had to contact me via sms and I answered as soon as I could or they phoned me in the first place. In these days, everyone, even old bastards like us, run to risk of turning into ADHD-monsters. My itunes has 200 gigabytes. That’s of course grotesque, because that’s such an unbelievable amount of albums I’ve never listened to, yet. Many of them were pure impulse buys.” The HIm singer regrets that certain time-honored values from the old, analogue world are lost in modern times. “Now we’ve come to nobody wanting to read an entire book and masterpieces being published in abridged versions. With Tolkien, that would probably mean that they’d cut out the whole bullshit and jump to the hobbits straight away,” he shakes his head. “But you have to accept that this is the world we live in today.”
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