The same location offers you the numerous dates of Love Amongst Ruin’s first European tour, which will have them pleasing fresh fans from Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Netherlands. The baptism of live fire has already occurred at EuroSonic this winter, plus a string of sold-out UK shows, culminating with an imminent slot at this year’s Sonisphere. They have plenty of rocking stuff to keep the crowds moving, no doubt about it, but there’s more to the sound of Love Amongst Ruin than straightforward riffage. The free downloads on their site include a mid-tempo ballad, called Truth, a solid proof of the band’s multiple sonic dimensions. It’s the kind of song that gets you so hooked on the instrumental side, that you forget about the lyrics. Then you listen to the lyrics and totally immerse into them, with the music sounding even better. Yeah, it’s one of those. Till ‘the truth’s gonna find you’ check out some video offerings:

Making of So Sad (Fade)

             But, then again, this is all context and that’s not what you hear when you’re listening to an album. Maybe the most obvious change you detect in Screamworks is that Ville’s vocals are not as “by-numbers” as before. There’s really an impression that he improvized a lot while recording his parts. It does get a bit overcrowded at times, like with Heartkiller or Ode to Solitude. On the other hand, this new method of more complex choruses hits home, Dying Song being the first to come to mind. And while we are on the subject of vocals, it’s hard not to notice this new energy that fills the album, which is probably the one with the most vocals (and no, I’m not counting screams).

            This energy goes along with the music, the upbeat, fast tones making Screamworks perfect material for live shows. Hopefully, they’ll open their future gigs with In Venere Veritas, because this is one perfect opener. Like St. Valentine and Shatter Me with Hope could also join that group. Add Love, the Hardest Way and you’ll have the HIM-est songs on the record. And then, there are the gems: In the Arms of Rain combines a lot of elements and influences, being the very definition of upbeat melancholy. Plus, its ending, with all the synth strings and “It’s the end of the road” line, is by far the best moment on Screamworks. The last track, The Foreboding Sense of Impending Happiness, the strangest HIM track to date, might or might not be the promise of radical changes in the future, but it is one wonderful experiment and an inspired way to end a record so that you’ll need to listen again right away. And it’s quite a surprise to have a HIM song reminding me of Vangelis. Katherine Weel is the catchiest tune and it would be a pity not to be released as a single, though references to a gun felatio might get the boys in trouble with some parents.

             Speaking of lyrics, Screamworks might just be Ville Valo’s best work yet. Each song contains haunting imagery and fresh takes on his favourite subjects of love and death. And life, this time. Acoustic Funeral‘s ”We’re dancing with tags on our toes” is just a brilliant way to claim one’s mortality, while still celebrating life. The metaphors used in Katherine Wheel offer yet another way to stress the bittersweet of l’amour, just like In Venere Veritas (extra kudos for having a chorus in Latin, not many go there). Still, I think Scared to Death remains the ultimate highlight of the record, maybe musically too, not just lyrically. “I’ll kiss that smile off your face” is just one those lines, that would have made movie history… if they were in a movie. It reminds us of 80′s hair metal, not as an emulation, but more as a tribute to a time when rock bands were ‘allowed’ to sing about love. “I’m not afraid to say ‘I Love You’” might as well be HIM’s ars poetica, since they had the guts to play romantic metal in a time when nobody else did it, influencing more bands than rock critics want to attribute to an act that’s still alive and going strong. 

Watching TV the other day and I saw this video for Alexandra Burke’s Bad Boys and I have to say that the plot as well as the coregraphy got my sick mind thinking about what could it all mean. You don’t have to watch too closely to realize that this video seems like a 4 minutes metaphor for a gang bang. The girl’s car breaks down in a shady neighbourhood at night and then she is slowly followed and surrounded by an army of thug looking fellows, who keep checking out her bod. They end up in a pool joint, where the guys make their move and she ends up dancing with all of them, while Flo Rida sits alone and sad outside contemplating “She so so addicted to them rougher fellas” or “get them more the merrier” and concluding “You’ll have them shawty don’t worry”. It all ends outside, where the bad boys circle the girl and one final face-off follows, leaving them big guys down on the ground. This is one faulty cautionary tale for girls walking alone at night…

WHAT D’YA THINK ?

And just so you wouldn’t think that I’m raging against The X Factor, because it’s the seasonal thing to do, I’ll focus my sick mind on a classic hit, a video which I actually saw the same day: Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl. The lyrics talk about, obviously, an uptown girl who is “getting tired of her high class toys” and I guess that because “she never had a back street guy”, she decides to look “for a downtown man”. In the video, the girl just so happens to have her chauffeur stop at a garage, where Billy and his gang of Merry Mechanics giver her the full treatment. As soon as she gets down from her car, the dancing starts. Two bikers and two breakdancers with weird tops join in and soon our uptown girl is dancing with 8 guys at once. Her chauffeur doesn’t interfere, which is very Once Upon a Time in America of him. This is a cautionary tale for all of you uptown boys, this is what happens when your girl gets tired of “living in her white bread world”.

Up WHAT Girl ?!

Journal for Plague Lovers.

             Some reports say that the working title is It’s Not War – Just the End of Love, which sounds pretty Wire-esque (I mean, it’s long enough). It will be the band’s tenth album and it will have the difficult task of following this year’s acclaimed Journal for Plague Lovers, which has the Manics feature in about every Best Albums of 2009 Top there is. And they deserve it, no doubt about it. If you still wonder why…

Question Time

See What I’m Talking About

Bright Lights

            It’s one of Placebo’s more  (if not the most) upbeat and bright-sounding tracks and they haven’t got too many of those, at least, not in such a mainstream sense of the word. Besides being a different sounding Placebo, Bright Lights is also an interesting lyrical work for Brian Molko. Thematically, this is for him what Ashes to Ashes was to Bowie — a cynical and ironic look at his “crazy livin”’. It feels as if, for the first time, he doesn’t hide behind a character anymore and acknowledges his real life persona, expressing regret over the choices he has made (speaking a lot about his life in the early days, thus distracting the attention from the music).

             The Heroes for Zeroes-directed video is also in tune with the song, as it starts with a dark setting only to end with Placebo playing on a background of blue skies — the journey from darkness to light that Battle for the Sun supposedly embodies. The single version of the song is slightly different than the album, as it features backing vocals by Val Etienne & Hazel Fernandes (Kylie Minogue, Jamiroquai).

BRIGHT LIGHTS VIDEO

Love Without Love

LISTEN TO Love Without Love

MUSIC VIDEO FOR THE SONG

Ok, I need to make this as clear as possible: what you are about to read is a joke, it’s having fun with lyrics interpretation. I’ve listened for many times to When in Rome’s The Promise and at one point, the lyrics started to sound like some remorseful wifebeater’s plea/threat thing. I mean, the song starts with the following verse: “If you need a friend, don’t look to a stranger, You know in the end, I’ll always be there. And when you’re in doubt, and when you’re in danger, Take a look all around, and I’ll be there”. Now… this could be easily read as a violent husband’s calm and ironic threat to his wife. “Don’t look to a stranger” meaning don’t ask for help, it will be futile because “in the end, I’ll always be there”. Then, when she is in doubt and in danger, he says “take a look all around, and I’ll be there”, so maybe that’s exactly the reason why she is in danger. The second verse is filled with other ambiguous stuff like “Sometimes, if I shout, It’s not what’s intended”. This kinda resembles “I’m sorry, but you make me do this. You know I love you” sort of line we hear in movies about violent spouses. The chorus sounds like another shape of the same line: “I’m sorry, but I’m just thinking of the right words to say. I know they don’t sound the way I planned them to be”, which means he expresses himself in all the wrong ways. And there is no escape for the poor woman, since he promises: “if I had to walk the world, I’d make you fall for me, I promise, I promise you I will …”, which means she could run and hide, but it’ll do her no good, because he’ll walk the world to find her. This is what his promise is all about. Crazy stuff. Remember that movie, Sleeping with the Enemy ? Just imagine a montage of Julia Roberts-Patrick Bergin scenes with this song as soundtrack…

I’ll finish up by reminding all of you Napoleon Dynamite fans out there that this is joke, I like this song just as much as you do – after all, it’s by listening to it thousands of times that I came up with these hidden meanings (and I admit, afterwards, it was pretty difficult to listen to it as the love song it was meant to be). So, if you can’t take a joke, go watch an Eddie Murphy movie…

LISTEN TO THE SONG AND READ THE LYRICS HERE