What comes into your head when somebody asks you about HIM? Well, I think like this
HIM, also known as His Infernal Majesty and favourite Band of Bam Margera. Now, don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but if you did take this as just another HIM album you wouldn’t be too far off of the truth.
HIM’s main Problem over their past 2 albums has been this; Bam Margera has given them a stamp of approval, which has made them famous worldwide. If they had just stayed as a small Finnish band, they wouldn’t be as universally hated as the general consensus is that they didn’t get where they are now on talent, but on the back of Bam
This is the general feeling, and you know what? I am with everyone else on this.
The album is roughly an hour long which is about half an hour too long as HIM have a habit of just making every song more or less identical, I mean, ok, some tracks stand out but for the most part, the album is identical to each other (if that makes sense).
It does have to be said however, that Ville Valo’s vocals on this album are quite good but that’s really the only continuous positive on the album since the instruments on most of the tracks are very poor.
There are some tracks on this album which stand out from the rest and those are the 2 of the 3 singles, these, if you didn’t know already are
Buried alive by love ,
The Sacrament and
Funeral of Hearts (the one that is bad), Each of these 3 tracks are different to each other, not to mention they that under the crap that is the rest of the album, there are a few gems. Of these 3
Buried alive by love is the is the heavier, with a nice guitar riff and very good drums. Ville’s vocals are simply
amazing on this song, with him just pouring emotion into the chorus, which shows Ville’s vocal diversity and the solo is quite a nice touch on the song as well.
The second and the worst of the singles is
Funeral of Hearts which begins with a Harpsichord in the background, which carries on throughout the whole song. Again, the best thing by far on the track is Ville’s vocals, which echo in the verses, the guitar, as usual in most HIM songs, is basic, boring and just plain bad but you don’t buy a HIM for instrumental virtuosity, or if you do, you need professional help because you won’t find genius instrumental skills on this album.
The truly best track on this album would, by far and away be,
The Sacrament which begins with a soft, nice piano intro. The slightly mellower of the singles, this song is the song that made me buy this album because I thought a lot of the album would follow in this vein. Unfortunately, it doesn’t because if it did, this would be an absolutely great album. The song has the greatness of Ville’s vocals again except, this time, the instruments don’t sound terrible in comparison to the vocals, which is a recurring theme throughout the album.
Unfortunately the other songs on this album just in a word, suck, and they suck hard. When you have songs that would struggle to keep your attention after 2 minutes, you don’t make it 7 minutes long. Unfortunately, this is the trend which runs throughout the album, songs that last about 6 or 7 minutes but would be hard pushed to keep you listening after 1 and a half minutes.
This album, unfortunately for them, does nothing to get rid of their we are only here because Bam Margera likes us tag, which is a shame because underneath all of this crap that they’ve put out, there is a classic just screaming to get out of them. This album, is, unfortunately, not it, but I think their new album may just be the one to shake off the Bam tag, lets just hope they realise love metal just doesn’t work
For HIM fans-4.5/5
For everyone else-1.5/5
HIM fanboys take note, this rating is not changing
Please rate and reply, and be nice, this is my cutting my overall teeth
