Back To The Future - 2007

The heavy, dark and progressive Venus Doom is a bold move from a stubborn band, that rather wastes good ideas than plays it safely.
The wall of smoke is so thick and gas-like, that it would be dumb to even try and cut it with a knife.
Well, if you can't beat them, join them.
So I light up and step into the cigarette smoke filled reunion room of manager Seppo Vesterinen's Helsinki headquarters.
I pity the reporter whose turn is after me.
He doesn't smoke. Yet.
- Hi! Says the source of the smoke, Ville Valo, and lifts his feet on the table.
- Glad you could make it!
Here I sit with seven Kents in my mouth.
And now I'm talking about the cigarettes, not the band.
There aren't even so many of them.
In the room next door someone plays HIM's new song Passion's Killing Floor on the computer.- We have hired assistants whose job is to listen to our music and compliment it to us, Valo grins.
I suspect he is kidding me.
Earlier that day in Lauttasaari, Helsinki, at the record company Helsinki Music Company's offices, I almost choked on my croissant when HIM's new album slammed my ears with it's heavy, gloomy complexity.
The awaited follow-up to Dark Light is not avantgarde, for sure, but it isn't either a record that you'd expect from a band that is guilty of a succession of commercial breakthroughs.
Venus Doom makes no compromises.-
Thank you.
Many of the song structures and melodies were actually quite pretty, really poppy.
I wanted to make them scarier.
Not too nice, but songs with an edge.- One of the wonderful things in music is that you can find a new method for making every album.
Back in the day I used my first royalty check buying a synthesizer.
First thing I ever did with that synthesizer, was the riff of Join Me.
I had never played keyboards in the past.
- Now we felt like "fuck those gay keyboards". We wanted the keyboards on Venus Doom to play a similar role as on our first album and on Razorblade Romance.
Then I found this fucking great Telecaster, plugged it into a fuzz pedal and started beating it. That's how the basic mood of Venus Doom was born.
Valo, the drummer Gas and the bassist Mige started working on the song projects by rehearsing as a trio, with Ville playing the guitars.
- We just played with no vocals, in the spirit of Cathedral, Sabbath and Type O Negative.
I improvised about 90 percent of Venus Doom's riffs in those sessions, and I'm proud of a few of them.
I like to create in the spur of the moment.
I can't just play 30 riffs on a tape and then rewind it back and forth, even if Tony Iommi does that.
Father Iommi would give his blessings to the riffs on Venus Doom, especially as the frequencies of these vibrate somewhere along the inner circles of Hell.
HIM is playing at moments in such lead heavy dropped tunings, and deepest in these dark waters is the vocalist Valo, who has come up with new footnotes to the low register of his vocal range.
- Bam Margera once told me at an afterparty, that I should sing in a lower key, because it would sound cool.
I thought that maybe I should, because no one else does it in heavy music.
The 69 Eyes is quite poppy after all, and Peter Steele from Type O doesn't sing very low anymore.
That kind of singing fits with the atmosphere of Venus Doom, with those metal vibes.
Venus Doom is HIM's darkest album.
At times it's as black as a frost bite left by a nuclear winter.
Some time before this interview I bought a tabloid paper, in which the journalist says he read somewhere else that Ville Valo suffers from a deep depression, that is now reflected on the new songs.
Is this true?
- The same journalist also said that Revolver is a british rock magazine.
So that speaks about the awareness of that particular journalist.
And if you use some dry, black humor in your interviews, and say that "our record was born out of a deep depression", and laugh on top of that statement, well, doesn't that speak of something else than depression?
What does Venus Doom's darkness speak about then?
- Well yeah, you don't make records as sad as this one by eating sausages and ice cream and laughing.
Art is born from pain and depression.
I'm the biggest fan of Edward Munch and Timo K. Mukka.
Of course you have to suffer, but it's happy suffering. Like a cleansing ritual.
Is it painful to return to those sad feelings by listening to the album?
- No, because it is cathartic.
It's good to pour out the feelings you can't tell to journalists at Lost & Found.
Listening to the album feels surprising, and that's an effect that great music produces.
Seeing the wood from the trees is always surprising.
During the process of recording, you concentrate on such small details, that you kind of live in your own small black bubble.
- I've always been depressed in a way, but when you are truly depressed, you can't make music, and you can't make much else either.
You can write about it afterwards, if you feel like it.
It's like sitting on top of your own hand, let it go numb, and then jack off.
It ain't too interesting.
Except for sailors.
So even if Venus Doom casts deep shadows, it's creator isn't too frowny about it?
- No, no. I've got wrinkles in other parts.
On Venus Doom HIM curves the straights in a way that invites to use the term "progressive". There are complex and progressive tracks on the album, but there is integrity to the structures. Even the epic Sleepwalking Past Hope, doesn't feel like it's really ten minutes long.- Fucking great if it doesn't.
There is a lot going on.
Bridges, tempo changes and lots of action.
Our motto while making this album was to "waste good ideas".
If we came up with a good riff, we put it on the song only twice, and came up with an even better one for the next part.
That way the album became much richer.
Did you have the need to show some people that HIM can be more than verses ticking with eighths and exploding choruses?
- If we had a need to prove something, then it's probably most apparent in Sleepwalking Past Hope, were we are possibly proving something to ourselves.
When that song was finished, it felt natural and complete.
The whole of Venus Doom has been created on an emotional basis, without thinking.
The arrangements were made by free association.
On purpose or not, Venus Doom proves that HIM is not a prisoner of it's own mannerisms.
- I feel the exact same way.
It's nice how without planning it, we came up with this record that is at the same time a polyphonic noise concoction, but still a completely coherent one.
Even when there is a lot going on, it's not just freaking around, there is a sense to it.
I listened to some Jethro Tull at home and started working it.
Our first album, Love Metal and Venus Doom are expressions of the progressive side of HIM. Maybe we should do a one track album next.
A sequel to Tull's Thick as a Brick.
In the middle of these complex changes and walls of riffs there is still always a chorus.
As if you wanted to show that you could have made a pop album, had you wanted to.
- I like music like that. Melodies and choruses you can hum along to. Evertyhing doesn't have to be supercomplicated.On Venus Doom HIM leaves love metal for those who came after them.
At least for the time being.
The band's new style -even more feminine and emotional on one side, and even heavier on the other- needs a name.
May that be venus doom.
- No, we'll call it gay doom.
Gas says that love metal is out, and that HIM plays gay doom.
It suits me fine.
On the other hand Venus Doom is a return to the massive song structures of Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666, the debut album.
- I think Venus Doom is a return back to the future.
The common ground with the first album are the non-linear song structures. But while making the record, all I had in mind was "what would make Lee Dorrian proud?". He taught me the secrets of doom. I played him demos, and he told me all his tricks.From the business point of view, Venus Doom makes no sense. What did the record company think about this artistic license, where a band that just achieved gold record status in the US, discards most of the poppy elements on their new album?
Today, as I visited your record company, I heard the following phrase: "Venus Doom is HIM's classic album, but air play issues have given us something to think about."- The record company had nothing to do with anything.
They liked all that we came up with.
Even the ten minute long Sleepwalking Past Hope.
They didn't speculate anything.
We got to make this album in all tranquility, and everything, even the order of the songs, fell on place automatically.
- We don't give a fuck about what song plays on the radio.
The music industry is everchanging, so thinking about things like that only makes you feel like the protagonist of Fight Club, like beating yourself up.
It's irrelevant.
Let's hope that some song gets a few plays somewhere.
The equation is finally quite simple:- If Venus Doom fucks up, then we'll tour like hell.
If it works out well, then we'll tour even more.
Then we can watch and see how far we drive ourselves into depression, to come out with something new and wondrous once again.
I'm sensing a dash of dryish, black humor amidst all this cigarette smoke.
(Original by Ari Väntänen for SUE Indierockpunkmetalzine -109, August 2007. Finland.)
Translation by Amourder,