Review: Lordi, Marble Factory

Nearly a decade on from adding to the gaiety of nations by loudly gatecrashing the bland Eurovision bom-bing-a-bong party, Finland’s Lordi remain one of the few competing acts to enjoy a career outside that Wogan/Norton-enriching smirky festival of cheese. Seven albums in, they’re still something of a cottage industry, drawing a mixed audience of metalheads, Eurovision nerds and the non-aligned curious for a show that lacks the expensive pyrotechnic bells and whistles of their TV appearances but compensates with all kinds of amusing props (chainsaw, smoking skull, severed body parts, etc) and roadies dressed up as demon grannies, devils, sinister clowns, and so on. Oh, and a drummer who does magic tricks. No, really.

At one point during How to Slice a Whore, Mr. Lordi even pulls what appears to be a string of sausages from the torso of a ‘corpse’ on a Poundstretcher operating table. Hey – metal and good taste were never comfortable bedfellows, but even our excitable friends the Easily Offended would struggle to get worked up about this, or the unfortunate timing of crash-themed recent single Scare Force One.

One of the advantages of being masked is that you can change personnel without the casual observer noticing. Just three members survive from the 2006 Eurovision line-up: bassist OX, droll Mr. Lordi himself, and rotting mummified Pharaoh guitarist Amen, who has the good sense to wear a costume that at least permits him a certain amount of movement. (Curious fact: OX, who rocks the Minotaur look, is of Egyptian descent – his real name is Samer el Nahhal).

Music? Oh yes, they played plenty of that too. Mr Lordi’s heavily accented growl remains something of an acquired taste, but works well on such big crunchy anthems as This is Heavy Metal, Hard Rock Hallelujah (defiantly played third in the set) and Blood Red Sandman. Unexpectedly, The Riff really comes alive on stage, while Sincerely With Love‘s “Fuck you, asshole” chorus is machine-tooled for a jolly crowd singalong.

Costume changes necessitate some momentum-sapping and really rather dreary solos from each member of the band, poor Hella being stuck at the back of the stage where it’s hard to see her splendid melting Barbie make-up. Mr Lordi’s wings put in an appearance during set-closer Devil is a Loser, which contains that priceless couplet “The Devil is a loser/And he’s my bitch”. Then he’s back in a pilot’s cap and shades for the encore of Scare Force One, followed by Who’s your Daddy? and the band’s first hit, Would You Love a Monsterman? It’s still not entirely clear where Lordi fit in to the world of Dressing-Up Box Metal. Kiss are bigger, Slipknot are more ferocious, GWAR are funnier and Ghost are more musically proficient. But this loudest of zombie-referencing Easter pantomimes was certainly a lot more fun than that other story about a bloke who rises from the grave.