An essay on metallurgy… or was it alchemy?

TASK: prepare a group interview on the basis of the text:

Three albums into their career, with healthy combined sales of 2 million, HIM felt it was the right time to define a couple of things. Define HIM ­ the band. Define the music, already commonly known as love metal. And, last but not least, figure out the deeper meanings behind the mighty Heartagram!

You hold the results in your hands, in the compact form of “Love Metal”. One and a half years worth of exploration and soul searching, as well as the time-honoured tradition of ‘working one’s ass off’, has gone into these ten songs.

“There we were. Gas a hopeless Slayer addict and Burton completely hooked on Tchaikovsky. Mige getting high on Brian Eno and Linde tripping on Jimi Hendrix on a regular basis. Villy Valo was curing his hangovers with shots of Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.”

Valo - vocals and songs. Gas - on drums, Burton - on keyboards, Mige - on bass, Linde - on guitar. Collectively they are known as HIM.

“We had no idea where it would lead us in the end. Whether it would turn out to be silly psychedelic music or the meanest metal known to man,” Valo grins. “But it felt really good. We just incorporated all the elements that came naturally and took it from there. With pretty mediocre success, of course…”

That last tongue-in-cheek shot reveals that Valo & co. are content ­ in fact they are immensely proud of their fourth album. Just listen to that new kind of urgency that’s so evident on songs like “Buried Alive by Love” and “Soul on Fire”! The deep dark groove of “Sweet Pandemonium”! The sheer spiritual qualities of “The Sacrament” and “Circle of Fear”. The innocent beauty of “The Funeral of Hearts”. The purgatory that is the epic finale, “The Path”. Consider love metal defined.

The making of “Love Metal” was a two-dimensional thing. The album was produced and recorded in Helsinki by Hiili Hiilesmaa, producer of the very first HIM album back in 1997. Hiilesmaa is noted for his work with mostly pretty uncompromising metal bands (Sentenced, Moonspell, Amorphis, Theatre of Tragedy…), and easygoing as he might be on the outside, in certain respects he runs a tight regime. Nobody survives his sessions if failing a serious attitude check!

“What has always fascinated me about Hiili is the manic way he approaches recording. The guy is nothing else but metal’s answer to reggae’s Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry! The Mad Scientist. One who always dares to experiment with things that others dismiss off-hand as crazy or laughable.” The second dimension came about through a transatlantic move. Next stop was Scream Studios, Los Angeles. Birthplace of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, Faith No More’s “The Real Thing” and countless other latter-day classics. The album was mixed there by Tim Palmer whose work, especially with U2, caught Valo’s attention. A bit of a surprise, this one?

“Yes and no. U2’s music as a whole isn’t really my thing, that’s right. Then again they have songs like “One” and “With or Without You” that are very close to the thing I try to achieve, you know, melodically, lyrically and feel-wise. But always with my own, shall I say, David Lynchian twist to it,” Valo reveals. “Tim did a beautiful job unearthing all those hidden treasures within our music. I could just sit back wearing the fly glasses that Bono had left behind at the studio, and listen to the music sort of unraveling before my ears.”

So it was as if a piece of Helsinki winter madness had been thrown onto Venice Beach. Or perhaps a case of LA smog vs. the midnight sun (with a few English showers thrown in for good measure, given the fact that Mr. Palmer is indeed a Briton). Light and darkness clashing. Whatever the case the different elements complement each other beautifully. The end result is a vibrant concoction of in-your-face riffs, heavy beats and sweet soulful melodies.

“I’m still quite amazed how easy it was in the end, making this album,” Valo confesses. “But then again, as we all know, Elvis has already done everything! I guess the man gone and took the load off our backs.”

When returning to LA for the video shoot of “Buried Alive by Love” (directed by ‘Jackass’ honcho Bam Margera and featuring actress Juliette Lewis of ‘Natural Born Killers’, ‘Cape Fear’ and ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’ fame), Valo was touched to find out first hand that even some of Kelly Osbourne’s friends proudly wore their heartagram tattoos. (Now one has to bear in mind that Kelly’s dad is pretty much responsible for the HIM guys being in the business in the first place…)

“I mean, uh… after all, how wrong can you go with a heartagram?” For once Valo seems a little bit lost for words. “We can argue about good or bad taste, but it’s a sensual symbol, isn’t it?”

Yes, the heartagram. The same symbol that is displayed on the album cover has followed HIM from the very beginning.

“We have such terribly short memory spans that we couldn’t possibly think of having individual symbols like Led Zep did,” the heartist himself laughs. “The heartagram stands for HIM as a band, as an entity. And for love metal in general.”

Harder than titanium, softer than pure gold, quicker than silver. Red hot or cold as steel. Love Metal.

Composing music

TASK: Sum up the following, stressing the composing aspect; make up a cloze on part of the script; using the tape, test your group-mates

Transcript

Presenter: From Bach to the Beatles, from madrigals to Motown, there have been people who have made a living out of writing music. One such is the composer of this particular piece …

Vince: My name’s Vince Cross. I’m a musician, primarily a composer. I suppose my basic skill is as a keyboard player: synthesizers, pianos, even an organ on a good day. And that has led me in the 1980s and 1990s into composing because um… keyboards have become the staple instrumentation for contemporary music, whether that’s pop or whether it’s more serious. And I suppose now I make a lot more of my living from composing than I do from playing keyboards… um… perhaps because I’m in the end actually better at that.

Presenter: So who does he compose music for?

Vince: Sammy Cahn, the American songwriter, m… made a joke when he was asked… um… about songwriting, whether he thought up the words or the music first, and he said, ‘First comes the phone call’. And it really depends on who phones me up and says that they need music to be written. That has very often been… er… people who require music for children in the past five to seven years, um… but it equally well be… could be for TV or radio commercials… er… for small-scale films… um… and recently for a TV series.

Presenter: Does he compose in a particular style?

Vince: No, I’m again… people have different strengths. Um… I’m no Mozart or Schoenberg or … By that I mean that I’m not the kind of person who’s going to be an incredibly original composer who’s going to do something new. Um… but I’m quite a good musical thief, in the sense that I can listen to a style of music and go away and come up with a piece of music that sounds quite similar to the style that I’ve just heard – again, whether that’s pop or classical. So recently somebody said that they wanted some baroque music for a film about the Tower of London, and I went away and did that. Um… equally well if somebody says to me they want a piece of rock’n’roll… um… I would hope to be able to manage that. And sometimes I get odd requests, like for a Mexican piece of music, or… er… next week I have to do a particularly African piece of music. And that’s good fun, it’s a challenge for me to come up with something in that style. It’s probably got my stamp on it, but… er… er… it’s good.

Presenter: What for Vince are the rewards of his work?

Vince: I’m one of those people who’s lucky enough to be able to combine their favourite hobby… er… with their way of earning a living… er… and when everything is going well of course that can be a great reward. Perhaps you lose something too, but I still think it’s a… it’s a pretty special way of being able to… to live is to do that. Er… the downside, the… the bad things about… er… being involved in music are that sometimes one works very long hours… um… and there is, as there is for all people who are self-employed, there’s the pressure that you’re earning your living really from the jobs you come up with, and therefore… um… nobody is paying you. Er… and of course if you’re in a paid job there may be many days when… er… you may not be working very hard but you’re still being paid for it. If I’m not working very hard I don’t get paid for it most of the time.

Presenter: Most of Vince’s work is commissioned, which means he’s working to a client’s brief. Does he ever get the opportunity to compose music for his own satisfaction?

Vince: Mm, I’m a songwriter really. And that means that I will tend to write my own lyrics as well as… er… music. And yes, I do do that. Um… it’s a bit of an unpredictable pastime, because there are occasions when you wake up in the morning and you have an idea for a song and you write it. There may be months when you don’t write anything for your own benefit at all. Um… it’s often useful also to have people you work with, singers maybe, of whom you’re fond, who will tend to inspire you to… to write things with them in mind. Um… and for the future, I hope to write musical theatre, and that’s something that you can only write, generally speaking, because you want to. But the problem is to make enough time… er… to do that, and… um… that requires, generally speaking, that you’ve made a lot of money at something else and therefore you can take a month off and… and write at your leisure… um… but yes, I write for my own pleasure too.

Presenter: What is it that he gets out of composing? What is the personal satisfaction?

Vince: That’s a very good question, and I think it’s actually quite difficult to answer. Um, there are… there are a couple of things that come to mind immediately: one is that it’s a very… it’s a very physical sensation, and most of my life has been spent with ideas, um… university and… and I was a teacher for a while. There is something very physical, almost like making something with your hands, about writing a song. Um… there is something that you can hear, and you can actually look at if you’ve written it down, at the close of that. And I find that a rather nice thing. There is also I think in a lot of musicians something a bit obsessive, um… you’re trying to achieve perfection in one particular area. Um… and maybe that’s what a… an instrumentalist is doing when he’s practising day after day. You think, ‘How can somebody just practise the piano for eight hours a day?’ Well, it’s trying to get something right, um… and you’ve got to be obsessive. You’ve got to be very ‘grooved’, I think, to want to do that, and I recognize in myself that there is a bit of my personality that’s like that.

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