HIM
Deep Shadows & Brilliant Highlights

"Deep Shadows & Brilliant Highlights" was released in 2001, and it carries with it the burdensome legacy of its illustrious predecessors, "Greatest Lovesongs V.666" and "Razorblade Romance", the first two albums by HIM, which introduced the Finnish band to the European public with their evocative dark and romantic atmospheres. And "Deep Shadows & Brilliant Highlights" is a work that, while continuing the group's musical discourse, somehow opposes the previous albums, presenting itself as probably the most serene and sweet episode of Valo & co.'s entire discography.

The splendid melodies of the Finns, already glimpsed in the debut album and then exploded in all their dramatic romanticism in "Razorblade Romance", here flow even more fluid and extended, and much of the pieces give life to atmospheres of extreme sweetness, almost paradoxical, enriched by Lindstrom's distorted sound of guitar and Valo's vocal play, elements that, combined and juxtaposed, create splendid crescendo finales that hit the listener with refined and sweet power, as in the case of the beautiful "Beautiful."

"Deep Shadows & Brilliant Highlights" creates, in my opinion, a subtle parallelism with its direct predecessor "Razorblade Romance", from which, however, as mentioned, it distances itself in the approach to the classic theme of the duality Love-Death: both albums live an unattainable dream of "extreme" love, a feeling taken beyond the pinnacle of its immense strength; but while in "Razorblade Romance" this dream is experienced in an unsettling way, with strong peaks of melancholy and despair, here instead a more serene dream is lived, where love manifests with calm vehemence, while the eternal antagonist Death is merely an expedient to reinforce love itself and make it absolute.

The only note out of tune in this context could be "Love You Like I Do", the track that closes the album, where accompanying Valo's baritone voice, the bass and keyboards create a dark, gray, and cold atmosphere, which then fades and disappears into the noise of heavy rain, interspersed with a slow toll of a bell; a "gothic" image this, perhaps overused, but here seems the inevitable conclusion of a piece whose drama does nothing but solemnize the promise of love contained in the lyrics of the track, and indeed, in the lyrics of the whole album.

The light rock of "Deep Shadows & Brilliant Highlights" gives the album a discreet rhythm, and makes listening very pleasant, so much so that the almost 45 minutes of the album's duration really fly by thanks surely to the splendid melodies, always successful, always evocative, that characterize each piece, and thanks also to the lyrics that mix well with the sound, and whose strength is sometimes in the declared simplicity, sometimes instead in the ability to evoke sensations, atmospheres, and distant echoes of extreme feelings, probably impossible, worthy of a dream.