Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
When you have perfected the art of controversy, even if done so with tongue firmly in cheek, the only thing that can stop you from achieving further notoriety is the limit of your own imagination and the depth in which you wish people to see you dwell. Controversy is the bitterest aspects of fame but in many ways it is also the most heartening, it is the testament to the human psyche that sees society applaud those willing to push boundaries and art and be cynical as time goes by of those that played the game with padding underneath their broad shoulders.
Like it or not, some bands court controversy because they can, because they see it as a way to take up arms against the banal and the beige, this sea of troubles only comes along because the world harbours the waifs and strays of the knitted pattern pullover brigade a safe passage; and to be fair, to praise even, Finnish band Lordi, controversy is just a state of mind being over analysed, over thought, it is the shark in the tank that is a thousand miles wide and five thousand miles deep, you only think you see it close to you, snapping at all you hold dear because you have been told it is there.
In the band’s 9th studio album, Sexorcism, Lordi’s Mr. Amen, Mr. Ox, Mr. Mana, Ms. Hela and of course Mr. Lordi himself, take up the gears of storm and argument to an even greater height and it is one that is exotic, playful verging on the gamble of jeopardy, a gift to the tyrannical masters and mistresses of good taste, the Mary Whitehouse’s of this world.
It is theatrical, a homage to the Lon Chaney and the Bela Lugasi, of putting music out there into the ether that captivates because we require, even desire to see the dark side in everything, we find the pull of the uncensored in our mind a vision of the freedom we would never take part in but still marvel at the way others willingly and without hesitation, submit their souls and their bodies to the song played with humour within the consequence.
In songs such as Your Tongue’s Got The Cat, Romeo Ate Juliet, Naked in My Cellar, Polterchrist, Rimskin Assassin and Sodemesticated Animal, Lordi really do attack on all fronts but one steeped in the dramatic, the wonderfully and supposed over the top, but one in which you cannot but want to hear more, of allowing the indulgence into the darkness to take over and relish the reward to come.
Lordi release Sexorcism on May 25th on AFM Records.
Ian D. Hall