HIM - One Last Time

In July of 2007 I reviewed HIM – Right Here in My Arms. It was the seventh music in review ever did, and HIM was a band I was really excited about.

HIM - Right Here in My Arms review: http://colinkellymusicinreview.blogspot.ca/2011/03/july-2007-him-right-here-in-my-arms.html

I was always concerned that HIM may have been a band I was getting into just because it was the right music at the right time. HIM is a band with one narrative message consistent throughout all their albums, love and death, and haunting combinations thereof. I got into HIM when I was twenty-two, or so, and like any young man I was thinking a lot about girls/love and of course death; of course. So HIM really reached me, but I was concerned that I might one day look back upon 2007 with some reproach. I thought perhaps one day I would out grow HIM.

Change is in the air always and forever. Fortunately I never did grow tired of HIM, and truthful I cannot imagine myself ever growing tired of HIM, just as I cannot imagine myself ever tiring of the two most prominent themes in all human creativity; love, the prelude to the happiness and creation, and death, the end. However there is cold comfort that forms in time with familiar things and sounds, and I am certain I have grown desensitized to the things that made HIM once so powerful a metal group.

When it began the HIM song the really won me over was “One Last Time,” a softer metal song, and one of HIM’s songs that full under the love category. Also “One Last Time,” struck a chord with me... well perhaps it is more appropriate to say “One Last Time” struck a slide with me since the song is almost entirely composed of slides. Regardless, the chorus lyric, “oh at least you could try,” about sums up my entire love life. One sentence, one lyric, pretty much says everything I need to say to every girl I have ever loved. This is not a complaint or a criticism, but a statement of understanding, there is no malice in my words, I understand. But understand this, no one has tried, and it seems to me that that is the least someone could have done.

Five years ago when I was really into HIM I wanted to do a review on “One Last Time,” but I made myself a promise not to do the same band more than once, so quickly or rapidly. Obviously with the double music in review per month I have been doing as of late that opinion is somewhat changed, and I feel it is time to revisit HIM.

Around their sixth HIM album I decided I had heard enough of their new stuff. The creative spark that made HIM special had burned out, and the raw emotion of their early years is unlikely to return. They can still make good music but they appear unable to make anything truly new anymore. Also I look at myself five years ago and some of the passion... some of the bitterness and dismay has faded in me. The song “One Last Time,” is still very beautiful to me, and I think it says a lot about a lot of people in a highly poetic way, but I feel the precipice of change, and my “One Last Time,” has either passed, or become indefinite and I am not sure which it is yet, and before that changes, or before I do, I want to sing this song to open skies, and I want you to know why.

It’s hard not to get personal when I think about songs like “One Last Time.” The song is a timepiece that captures an entire part of my life. I should be rambling about the slides in the song. I should be talking about how it’s one of HIM’s songs where Ville’s echoing voice is used perfectly accompanying those slides. I should be talking about the lighter themes of loss and death that the song hints at, and how this one song plays a part in the bigger art piece that is the rest of the album “Razorblade Romance.” I should probably mention that “Razorblade Romance,” is like the most badass name possible for an album about love and death. When a song makes me forget about the many attributes and parts that make up its whole and drags me inward into my soul leaving me struggling to say anything, as I am lost in the emotions I usually prefer to hide... there is something beautiful about that. It is such a simple request, “at least you could try,” do I really ask too much? It still gets to me.

Until later this month, keep on rocking in the free world.

- Colin Kelly