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Rating: HIM began their musical career in 1997, immediately demonstrating a precise tendency and inclination towards specific themes linked to a shadowy, nuanced conception of the love experience, expressed through dark-metal symbolism that, quite evidently, does not fit well with the content of their lyrics, but which, in fact, has its distinctive function.
The love Valo talks about in his songs, in a certain sense, could be considered purely as an aesthetic device for its own sake in the sense that, the songs often resolve around variations on the same tópos, the same expressions: love and death, united with a selected terminology related to hypothetical connections with the devil or rather, the dark side of existence. In respect to this, we might legitimately think that Valo, deliberately, and cunningly, plays on the ambiguity of the eros-thanatos couple with a view of gaining precious approval from teenagers, fascinated by the dark side of things, coupled with a not too demanding musical style. And it is not excluded that it is so, in part.
However, it is necessary to go beyond, to compromise with Valo and try to understand the underlying concept behind his compositions. Love, obviously, is at the center of every song, a love, above all, melancholy, tearful, imbued with a systematic sensation of sadness. A love worthy of the best elegiac poet: Valo engages in sweet expressions at the limit of sentimentality ("Right here in my arms"), imagines a love made of torments ("Poison girl"-"Heartache every moment"), up to the extreme thought of a feeling extended beyond life itself ("Join me in death"-"When love and death embrace"). On the other hand, however, everything is surrounded by a metal, gothic aura, with diabolic references, almost to enhance the sensation of darkness, of torment, of pain. Above all, we cite "Your sweet six six six", or "Gone with the sin". But on close inspection, the more experienced wrinkle their noses at considering the label of gothic-metal attached to H.I.M.. In fact, Valo's group is far from playing metal. But Valo is aware of it. He does not do metal. Simply, he uses the structures of metal to build around them gothic elegies of love and death of a neoclassical flavor. And in this, he shows a complete artistic technique, originality and also, if we wish, a certain depth, where usually love songs are the worst in every genre.
Through the dark references, it sublimates a feeling often trivialized in music. Sure, HIM's songs are not rock masterpieces, they do not convey moral or ideological content, they are not even frightening...(!). But it is known, the elegy is a gentle, humble composition. And yet, it too has its dignity, in being an expression of the subjectivity of the individual, torn by the contradiction and the equivalence between love and death.
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