Credit: Found On Internet

Ville Valo looks bored. His face looks like that if he was sat at a bar, head resting on one hand, huffing at the obsolescence of it all. Given that the pretty boy frontman of Sweden’s HIM has been clean and sober for the last six months, if you were to find him in a bar somewhere he probably would be put out by his solitary glass of Diet Coke, but tonight his band are headlining the first of two nights at the London Astoria, and you’d hope he’d be just a little…enthusiastic?

Perhaps its because his band’s opening track was greeted by a sea of camera phones, rather than a raucous mass of kids going apeshit. But then, standing in the crowd listening to HIM’s gummy riffs, why should they? Like so much European rock music, HIM manage to play in a weird limbo state that makes their riffs sound like they’re half-copying something they heard on the radio, but somehow lost its spark during the appropriation. It at once sounds both flaccid and clichéd in the same moment.

Although superceded somewhat in the minds (and pocket monies) of the tweeny metal masses (those middle class teenagers with too many lip rings and jeans so tight they stunt growth) by those emo hipsters, My Chemical Romance, HIM needed to come out fighting. They need to shore up their core audience, reassure them of their potency, and in doing so, snare in the new fans with some metallic crooning. With new record ‘Venus Doom’ to peddle, maybe they’ve got some fancy new tricks up their velour sleeves.

So where a cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Games’ comes into that, I don’t know. Except that HIM’s version, which they’ve been peddling for ten years now, seems more listless than ever.

Valo and co look like there’s pretty much nowhere else on Earth they’d less like to be than on stage at the Astoria. Even for the big hits – ‘Buried Alive By Love’ has any sense of urgency sucked clean out of it, and ‘Wings of a Butterfly’ almost sounded like it was being played backwards, so sedate was the display of rock’n’roll on show – are left floundering in a hash of half-arsedness. When the frontman raises his arms to signal the crowd of kids to roar the central hook, he does so with all the gusto of a monged-out opium addict feebly gesturing at the den master to pass him another pipe.