In case you haven’t been able to identify that weird logo you see everywhere these days – on car windows, scratched into wet cement a block down from the high school, inked into a lower-back tattoo of a girl at the mall – that pentagram whose top two points have been rounded off belongs to HIM. The symbol, half heart, half pentacle, is more than just handy band imagery and clever iconography. It’s a window into HIM’s musical soul.

If there’s ever a band more torn between its dark and dangerous side (thus the pentagram) and its romantic, sensitive side (the heart), it’s His Infernal Majesty. The Finnish act, better known by its HIM acronym, never quite makes peace between its lover and devilish ends on Greatest Love Songs, Vol. 666. It doesn’t even try. It’s safely at home in the world of Interview with a Vampire, where classic romance blooms in the darkest of murk. While it’s a formula that makes Chris Carrabba and Peter Murphy sound dispassionate, it comes closer to succeeding on this album than HIM’s ever done before.

Sounding somewhere between an overproduced Sisters of Mercy and Killing Joke covers band and a red-wine-and-black-roses twist on glam metal, Greatest Love Songs, Vol. 666 shows about as much restraint as you’d expect from an album that mixes song titles like “When Love and Death Embrace” and “Your Sweet Six Six Six.” While the act’s frilly metal riffs (think Wayne Hussey plays the best of bad hair metal) never sound particularly spooky, the band finds some interesting moments. They’re usually when playing other people’s songs, though: Recreating the obvious (Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”) and the surprising (Chris Issak’s “Wicked Game”), HIM trots out some kid-friendly Goth metal that’s almost slick enough to win over a card-carrying Black Sunday regular. Other tunes are catchy in a skeleton-in-your-closet way, as the metallic riffs and epic vocals of “Your Sweet Six Six Six” and “Beginning of the End” are embarrassingly catchy in a totally stupid way. Other tunes (“When Love and Death Embrace” and “Heartless”) just give a rather token makeover, courtesy Hot Topic eyeliner and little else, revamping the same monster ballads that stole the hearts of teenage girls in the mid-’80s.

But gosh darn, if HIM doesn’t try its hardest to sound spooky. If the atmospherics (singer Ville Vallo sounds more like Marilyn Manson than he’d like to admit) don’t do it, the casual nods toward the occult and Satanism should. HIM wraps its dime-store nods to the dark side in romantic imagery and tales of love, coming off more like something that could trigger even Anne Rice’s never-used quality control alarms.

HIM might be scary, but only if you were raised in a convent in South America. HIM could be romantic, but only if your idea of romance could have been worked into a Dark Shadows storyline. Truth be told, it’s a little bit of both, but a lot of neither. Like the loving pentagram that’s its symbol, HIM strives for tension between opposites, but just ends up sitting lukewarm in the middle.

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I love bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Motley, W.A.S.P etc. I also happen to think that HIM are one of the most insightful bands to hit the Rock/Metal/Alternative scene in a long time. If nothing else, they give the above scenes a long overdue kick up the Ass. Which is probably why the die hards, who are so afraid of change, dont like them.

posted by Sam on Jul 31, 2009

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wow you guys cant read. Read the article through again, properly, you illiterate e-bullies and then critisise. besides HIM are crap anyhow.

posted by anon. on Mar 27, 2008