Label: The EndRating: 2 Guns
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Written By: Dashiell Arkenstone
The dead sing about being dead - A straight-forward dark rock n’ roll album with hot guitar licks and party-time gang vocals sung in a graveyard wrapped in a theatrical presentation.
This album is exactly what you would expect from five grown men who wear leather and makeup in dramatic poses with black hair dye smeared on their faces. Not in the “legit” black-metal way, but more of an Avenged Sevenfold, too much hair product and foundation wandering Sunset Blvd at 3 in the morning kind of way; but they’re Finnish so we let them get away with it.
It’s an over-produced, heavy guitar driven record with a catchy hook and smooth solo weaved through one hard rock anthem after another. With song titles riddled with mandatory subjects such as blood, being dead and making out with dead girls, you’re promised one thrilling and prolific full length. Down to the skull and roses on the album cover, ‘Back in Blood’ further solidifies the Helsinki quintet as vanguards of the Goth/Horror rock movement. These guys have been at it since ’89 and haven’t lost their edge or ability to pump out melancholy works that secrete simple melody and ill-lit chords and key changes.
This genre can get ridiculously cheesy. But these dudes have some charm in their darkness. This record gets straight adorable in fact. In ‘Dead Girls Are Easy’, a song about corpses with broken hearts, we find out that the dead girls only wanted to rock. Of course! This album could be the soundtrack for the ‘Top Gun’ remake about vampires! That’s right, IMDB that shit. ‘We Own the Night’ is the “pump your fist out of the grave” equivalent to Pat Benatar’s ‘All Fired Up’, and is perfect to blast out of your Hello Kitty boom box that’s covered in AFI stickers and encrusted to the bathroom sink as you’re applying your eye makeup before a night of Popov and Tampico in the park.
“Lips of Blood” is a slower jam where vocalist Jyrki 69 channels his inner Mortiis: ERA 2, and reminds us of why we would never want to fall asleep in the same room as him (another zombie love story). As the album progresses, the vocals get dull to a point where you wish the band was just instrumental. His monotonous and stationary performance is carried out through each track in the same formulaic approach as if he were actually deceased, and not pretending.
Regardless of the standard vocals, this is an enjoyable 48 minutes that will fly by sooner than you realize that I made up the Top Gun remake.
Like ‘THE 69 EYES’? Check out: Type-O-Negative, Danzig, Sisters of Mercy
