Decibel will concede that we fucked up something in last year’s Finnish Metal issue. In addition to trademarking Chris Dick’s breakdown of Finnish metal bands per capita (THANKS, OBAMA!), we really should have included the sadly overlooked Helsinki death rockers Babylon Whores in our Top 30 Finnish Metal Albums of All Time list. Their King Fear record should have made the cut based on the strength of opener “Errata Stigmata” alone.
Anyway, with little fanfare, Babylon Whores went tits up over a decade ago.
“I guess Babylon Whores ran its course,” former frontman Ike Vil tells Decibel. “I think if I had continued, I’d be either dead or in the big house. I think the legacy of Babylon Whores was that, especially in the beginning, I really didn’t want anything to do with metal. We even consciously avoided writing riffs.
“Afterwards, I tried to avoid music altogether for almost 10 years, but in the end, I was lured back in, as they say in the Godfather!”
The inevitable result is Vil’s new project Sleep of Monsters, which released their first LP, Produces Reason, back in 2012, definitely feels like a mature progression on from the Whores.
“Now, having played the kind of adult occult rock, or easy listening for the deranged, or whatever you want to call the music of Sleep of Monsters, I think I’d welcome a couple of metal riffs on the next album again.”
“‘Poison King,’ the opener of our new album [II: Poison Garden], sort of changed my mind. Still, being the distinguished, graying crooner I’ve become, I think it’s still gonna have more to do with Frank Sinatra than Cannibal Corpse!”
The video for “Golden Bough” certainly confirms that. What’s more, the clip looks like it was shot with a Hollywood budget. Vil assures us that the vivid treatment was actually executed on an indie rock/metal budget.
“If you promise you won’t tell anyone, I can reveal that the budget wasn’t actually that big,” he confesses. “We were just being resourceful in a number of ways! And of course big credit goes to director Herra Ylppö… and the ingenious script writer who came up with the idea for a Deipnon for Hekate. Go ahead, you can google it!”
II: Poison Garden is available from Svart on June 3. Or TODAY for those of your reading this on June 3.
