Bomb Brigade
"I Used To Love HIM...But I Had To Kill HIM..."That's what Guns N' Roses would have said,were they to review this immediately forgettable piece of work.It's such a shame,too,as HIM was a band that had shown true promise for the goth/glam community just a few short years earlier.I can certainly appreciate what Ville Valo is trying to say about relationships with his often brilliant narrative prose,but that just isn't enough. What happened?Did cleaning up and setting down the bottle inhibit Ville's creativity?Were the critics,who were,at times,unnecessarily harsh with their reviews for the brilliant Dark Light,too much for Ville to withstand and force him to return to a less hook-structured(and thereby commercially appealing)style and curb his passion for constructing brilliant melodies?Or did Ville simply run his creative well dry of all its juices?Not sure.What can be said,for certain,is that this album is the band's weakest offering to date(even weaker than 2007's equally forgettable Venus Doom). And to think that it took the great Ville Valo three years to deliver us this platter.