The 69 Eyes - Blessed Be

The Finns are rocking again! What started with "Wasting The Dawn" (still to come) now continues with "Blessed Be": away from the pork rock of the early days to a very dark Goth sound. Admittedly, the boys around the charismatic singer Jyrki will not reinvent the genre, but they definitely breathe new life into its undead body! An irresistible piece is offered between beautifully catchy and straight ahead rocking, whereby the highlights are difficult to find, because there are simply too many. The 69 Eyes show as many facets as Goth Rock has to offer, but above all the details make each piece unique. There are noisy songs like the opener "Framed In Blood", "The Chair" or the ingenious "Velvet Touch”, but also very atmospheric and calm pieces like the second single “Brandon Lee” or the “Sleeping With Lions” enriched with a lot of New Wave and Post Punk. There is something interesting to discover in every song, such as the light ZZ Top borrowings in "Angel On My Shoulder", the confused electro swipe in the hardest number on the album, "30", or even a little blues/soul in “Graveland ". All of this is served with a huge portion of black humour, which on the contrary does not detract from the pleasantly dark mood. The influences from The Doors, Billy Idol to Type-O-Negative and HIM are so well mixed that it inevitably results in a unique style, so the allegations of plagiarism do not apply here. If you need an ideal soundtrack for your next visit to the cemetery, or an upcoming sex orgy, whatever you do: put on "Blessed Be"!

This is a fantastic album, flat out. The unique leads and gloomy vocals set a very effective atmosphere, while still having a great Goth'n'roll sound, which is what I imagine they were trying to achieve.

The 69 Eyes

They are the band that time forgot. They are the band that refuses to die. They are the Helsinki Vampires.

Conceived in Finland in 1989, dark rockers The 69 Eyes have come a long way and shaped the genre of ‘Goth ‘n’ Roll’ like no other. With several platinum selling albums like ‘’Blessed Be’’ and ‘’Paris Kills’’ released around the millennium, the quintet not only reached #1 of the single and album charts in their home country of Finland, but also plunged the world into their sinful cosmos of love, death and eternal melancholy and only then outlived any other band emerging from the goth hype of the early 2000s. Initially, The 69 Eyes' music style was of glam metal influenced by acts such as Mötley Crüe and Hanoi Rocks. However, they began to incorporate more influence from gothic rock bands such as The Mission, The Cult, The Sisters of Mercy and The Lords of the New Church. Their sound was described as a mix of the gloominess of gothic rock with guitar-powered rock 'n' roll.