When Ville Valo (VV) dropped a new release during 2020, listening to the new songs while spending most time indoors, due to very obvious and not soon-to-be-forgotten reasons, brought back memories. Though I doubt any clarifications are needed, Ville is the former singer of the Finnish goth rock (or love metal) band HIM, which I stumbled upon 25 (!!!) years ago. They instantly became my favourite band, opening the doors to goth rock, goth metal and heavier stuff, and to a lot of other Finnish artists that I still listen to this day. I can fill in several posts on this blog just by reminiscing those times and the impact the music had on me. But I won’t. Because this is not about HIM (which were the headliners of the first ever festival I attended), this is about last evening’s concert. So let’s take a short detour from memory lane, for now, and focus on the present, though it will be hard to separate the two.
So after 2020, VV started teasing us with singles in 2022, and released a full album in 2023. To my delight, he also chose to tour, and included Stockholm in his stops. The tour arrived in Bucharest at the beginning of the month, and I read a few reviews and followed the event as, just like everywhere else across Europe, Ville and his music are very loved and appreciated by quite a large audience in my home country, and yes, mostly due to his former band. So I went to this concert with what I had already read at the back of my mind, without checking the setlist, and just knowing that he alternates his new tracks with HIM classics. The venue: Berns. Lovely location, been to a few concerts there before, and somehow very fitting for a goth rock evening. The opening act: Zetra. I would have loved them 20 years ago. Unfortunately for them, the sound was poor. Don’t know if it was because of where I was standing (middle back), or because the sound engineer didn’t care much, but it was quite unfair to them and to us. And again, unfortunately, the sound issues continued a bit into Ville’s show too.
Around 9 pm the man made it on stage to the delight of a sold-out venue. He started the concert with Neon Noir, the title track of his first album, and immediately after jumped into Right Here in My Arms. And the audience exploded. And I am going to say it now so I get it out of the way: never in my several years of attending concerts in Sweden have I seen the audience having such an intense reaction. There were no moments of patiently and quietly waiting for the next track, no awkward silence, but a continuous thrill. I’ve never seen people dance the way they did, singing along every verse, reacting after intense lyrics or highly anticipated guitar solos. It left me bedazzled. But this only enhances the value and the appreciation of the man that was standing in front of us on the stage, a man, an artist, whom even if he didn’t share many words, let slip more than words can say: our reactions, our singing along made him glance back at us and smile. Really smile, clearly happy for what the music was bringing his way from us. And on the opposite side there we were smiling and happy for what the music was bringing our way from him.
But it took up to the 6th track (Kiss of Dawn – not a favourite, probably the only song of the evening that I could have been without) for the sound to settle, for the drums to stop sounding like they were stuck on the bottom of a plastic barrel, for the guitars to blend and for Ville’s voice to sound as it should. That was also about the same time the sound engineer sat down and allowed me to have a first class view of the stage.
The evening beaded for us a string of new songs intertwined with HIM classics, one of each. People went crazy on Buried Alive By Love and sang along to the new music, proving again, without it being necessary, how much it was missed and needed. Gone with the Sin was an amazing display of a goth ballad, allowing Ville to showcase his low and deep voice. But while it was a bliss to listen to all of these tracks, I was surprised by the fact that the new songs sound better live than their recorded versions. Which is exactly the opposite of HIM songs. Maybe I want to read too much into this, but also maybe it shows a sign of musical maturity from the melancholic Finnish musician. While HIM albums are all very well produced and a pleasure to listen to, full of hooks and addictive sentiment, the new tracks didn’t strike a chord in me until I heard them live, and I also heard things I didn’t catch while listening to their studio versions.
Join Me (in Death), still one of the most beautiful songs ever written and one of my favourites, if not even the one, was sung by everyone, and if it had been a seated venue, it would have gotten a standing ovation. It’s timeless. But the biggest shock of the evening for me was Saturnine Saturnalia, a new one. I had it on repeat all day today. Hearing it live was such a beautiful moment.
The encore had three songs: two HIM classics (the first one being Killing Loneliness) with the new Baby Lacrimarium in between. After taking us all the way back to 1997 with the beautiful When Love and Death Embrace ballad, Ville bowed his head to all parts of the audience, smiled and walked off stage in the frantic clapping and screams of the audience. His live band ended the show with an instrumental postlude and that was that. But there’s more to Ville Valo and HIM than what this post can talk about and in the end some things are better left unsaid, as they need to be listened to.