Are you an eye-shadow-drenched, melodramatic 16 year old who has just gone through a break-up? If NO, forget this album exists and carry on. If YES, then you’re in for a real treat. Tears On Tape is the perfect compliment to your tub of ice cream and jar full of tears. Don’t worry, there’s pleanty more fish in the sea and HIM are here for you.
In all seriousness, Tears On Tape is the latest release from Finnish metal heavyweights HIM that has pleased fans and reviewers around the world, with chart positions to prove it. This has me more than a bit perplexed.
We’ll start with the lyrics. It’s obvious the angle that HIM are going for – a dark love storyesque kind of vibe – but they simply miss the mark and end up singing about what seems to be some soundtrack depicting the Twilight movies. I’m a huge fan of well-written and poetic, dark lyrics (see Swedish dark metal gods Katatonia), but these lyrics are more resemble a bad crime novel. For the jury, I present exhibit A from title track ‘Tears On Tape’, “Darkness falls, settling the score with love for once and for all, soaked in blood I cry.” Again, it’s easy to see lyrically what is trying to be achieved, but it’s far from a masterpiece.
Musically the album is generally as standard as the lyrical side of things. There’s little flow to speak of, featuring countless heavy(ish), distortion-filled chorus riffs and crashing drums parts that head straight into verse sections with nothing but drums, bass and acoustic guitar with no bridging sections to speak of. The riffs are nothing amazing, most being simple drop-tuned, start-on-open-string textbook rock diddies. Ville Valo’s voice gets tedious also, this in combinaiton with those lyrics makes for a pretty average listen.
Production-wise is where Tears On Tape gets the few points it has. Each part sits well in the mix and there is a great bass distortion used in parts, but unfortunatly aside from that tone (which really, only bass players will probably notice) there isn’t much to highlight.
Last but not least, the track titles are misleading and don’t seem to match. I thought when doing a review of a song ‘I Will Be The End Of You’ I would be in for a rage-filled five minutes of agression that would make me want to build a lego city with the sole purpose of crushing it, but instead the title tricked me into enduring more Twilight lyrics and stock riffs.
I don’t like being tricked.
3/10
Reviewer: Thomas Peasley