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PLAY DEAD: Ville Valo (center front), Finnish frontman for His Infernal Majesty, seems to be as...

 

Gaunt and pale, Finnish rocker Ville Valo has — in his 10-year career fronting HIM (His Infernal Majesty) — become not only a bona fide European superstar, but a new creepy hero for the Goth-pop set.

The rep is well deserved. He's got the Edward Gorey-ish lyrical imagery going, as on melodic dirges from his latest "Dark Light" disc for Sire: "Play Dead," "Vampire Heart," "Rip Out the Wings of a Butterfly."

He even has his own logo — an inverted, round-topped pentagram dubbed the Heartagram — that appears on just about any item Hot Topic is currently carrying, and also in tattoo form on the skin of his more devoted followers.

When you're ushered into the man's smoky backstage lair, he offers an appropriate caveat: "We're a Goth band, more or less, so be careful! We're super-miserable and super-mysterious!"

But once your eyes adjust to the light, a less sinister picture emerges. The 28-year-old Valo is, in fact, kind of goofy. He's wearing red-checkered trousers, fingerless gloves, a Hooters T-shirt, and his lips are curled into a permanent grin that barely manages to hold the dozen cigarettes he chain-smokes over the course of an hour.

Sure, Valo shrugs, he's studied all the right spooky occult topics, like Crowley and the Rosicrucians. And he definitely believes in reincarnation.

"But I'm into octopi and squid," he declares. "I think that's where I belong, that's where I'm going to go after I'm dead. I'm going to be a giant squid that's going to be caught after two weeks of living."

Onstage with HIM, Valo transforms into a "Matrix"-mystical rock god, throwing his typically cloaked frame into Baudelairian lines like "Deranged we're tearing away the petals of desire/ Learning the mathematics of evil by heart ... and descend to the circle number four where we are nothing."

Valo reveals that his influences mostly are movies and books.

"And it goes in phases, doesn't it?" Valo asks rhetorically. "You become a film buff, go through all the information you can, then all of a sudden you're like, 'Ah, screw i. I want to start reading again.' That's how I am — a few months of intense interest. Especially with writing music and lyrics, I want to suck in as much information as I can, visually and word-wise. Lately I've been reading William T. Vollmann, the guy who wrote about the red-light district of San Francisco in 'The Royal Family' — it's pretty rough."

For grim, pulsing musical moods, Valo also cites the soundtracks of horror-flick maestro John Carpenter ("He's a genius") and Angelo Badalamenti's surreal scores for David Lynch ("There's a childlike interest throughout Lynch's work, and then the Angelo soundtrack moves it along").

"Dark Light's" imagery kicks off with its cover painting, featuring a huge heartagram-emblazoned citadel rising from a storm-tossed sea. The concept?

"It's Noah's ark meeting a lighthouse meeting 'The Day After Tomorrow,'[TH]" explains Valo. What's his own castle like in Helsinki? Surprisingly barren, he admits. He just moved into a new flat and hasn't had time to decorate yet.

"But my previous place was just horrendous. You should've seen it. I didn't do the dishes for two years straight, and I am serious. And I collected all sorts of stuff, and basically you just keep throwing it wherever until you end up with a 20-inch mass of junk on the floor, with little creepy things living in it. We don't have cockroaches in Finland, but there tiny maggots and stuff like that."