(Sire/Warner Bros) Total Time: 54.03
Ok...I’m busted here, I confess! HIM is not my best band in the whole world, but since I was given their new album “Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice”, the seventh full length release, for a review I just ought to put my personal likings aside and be as objective as possible! Nevertheless, the album contains 13 tracks, each and every single one of those had this amazing effect on me: I was re-living and re-listening the same sounds, ideas, performance, e.t.c. over and over again until my pc went silent after the final track was over…
This band seems to have found the secret formula of “How to make time stand still”. Not that one could not see that coming but let’s face it: HIM is a band that stayed exactly the same, postponing in definite, as it looks like, their musical evolution with Vile being in the front line of this unnecessary fight with time and interior maturing. And that’s the reason why gradually but steady HIM came to release a seventh album that is characterized by that same old sense of vampirism, narcissism, eternal love, suffering and plenty of all these stuff that Love Metal is consisted of .Maybe it’s this -Gods forbid- genre that HIM turned into their personal “flag” and maybe it’s the fact that no one would dear to change a recipe that would make him a millionaire. The thing is that this provoking inertia certainly has its roots somewhere far beyond HIM’s love for music and closer to commercial success.
Musically, “Screamworks…” feels like the perfect “handbook” for all the love-sick teenagers; The synthesis follows down the same road almost all through the album; the catchy guitar riffing, gothic-like passages, melodic piano parts, smashing chorus lines and generally the predictable way of HIM’s songwriting can be easily detected in here by the hearing of the very first songs of the album. Of course, Valo’s erotic sighs could not be missed in this one also. One of the few surprises though is the vocal element of growling, unfortunately only in a few parts, that give a different prospective to the whole feeling which the “dark” singer tries to impose the listeners…The lyrical themes aim to the same target group mentioned earlier, and that is teenagers, “emos” and heartbroken creatures all over the universe, a fact that’s kind of ironic and at the same time a proof that this supposed grief and depression could never find followers among the true romantic and gloomy souls…
Thank Gods for Anathema, My Dying Bride, Katatonia e.t.c…
I guess if this is the suggestion of how things work concerning Love in Theory and Practice then HIM should guess again!
