Lordi, the quintet from Espoo, Finland are well known for their monster masks, outfits and heavy use of horror elements. With seven studio albums that revolve mostly around heavy metal, hard rock and shock rock, Lordi are back with their newest release Monstereophonic (Theaterror vs. Demonarchy), the follow-up to 2014’s Scare Force One.
When it comes to Lordi and their music, it’s good and extremely fun. Dark themes and disturbing horror tales are delivered with a sense of humor.
This shows especially in their brilliant first two albums, 2002’s Get Heavy and 2004’s The Monsterican Dream, where the band recorded some of their shocking yet fascinating music videos that helped to develop their image.
But album by album, intentionally or unintentionally, Lordi slowly started to separate from their origins, where they were heavily influenced by the bands such as KISS, Alice Cooper and Twisted Sister, and accepted many influences from American glam bands from the ‘80s.
This separation has hurt Lordi’s music on many levels, experiencing the same music patterns over and over, trying to find a new language in their own music while it seems they are losing their vision of the passionate and catchy music from their early albums.
Monstereophonic is unnecessarily long. Lordi’s longest album to date, one hour of time is a bit much for their music. Lordi are trying to examine different tunes in their music yet mostly focused on heavy metal and a slight bit of shock rock.
Monstereophonic starts with a traditional “SCG” opening song, this time entitled as “SCG8: One Message Waiting” followed by “Let’s Go Slaughter He-Man (I Wanna Be the Beast-Man in the Masters of the Universe)”, which is an absolute classic Lordi. Classic Lordi tunes are rare to find in Monstereophonic, but its pale shadows are visible here and there. “And the Zombie Says” brings hints of Lordi’s early themes, which still deals with the band’s new tunes.
Despite Monstereophonic’s fragile stance as an enjoyable Lordi album, the powerful performance from the members of the band and Mr. Lordi’s impressive strong work as the vocalist keeps the flame of Lordi’s name alive.
Some might find Monstereophonic interesting and others might find it boring, but surely it displays Lordi as a Sabaton wannabe rather than a band who had major influences from KISS and Alice Cooper.
(released September 30, 2016 on AFM Records)
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