The solo project of Sami Hynninen is by turns slightly creepy, unexpectedly profound, and quite hilarious as his unwieldy guitar-based songs and wild imagery reference necrophilia, rainbows, sado-masochism, bunnies and fart sniffing.
Cobra records claim that Opium Warlords is an identity secret with this disc arriving from persons unknown. But many other sources seem to know that it comes from one person: Sami Albert Hynninen, known for his work with The Puritan, Reverend Bizarre, Armanenschaft, Spiritus Mortis, and more. The release is full of the contradictions which come from naming your "group" Opium Warlords and residing, at least symbolically, in the territory of death metal or Satanic rock. Despite the clichés, Live at Colonia Dignidad offers a few surprises. For example, the splendidly named “Suck My Spear, Servant of Satan” turns out to be an unexpectedly relaxing listen rather than an ode to some darkly stylized oral sex ritual. The piece is almost pseudo-medieval in tone, as if Tortoise had been inspired by a dub version of a Wishbone Ash instrumental.
Much of the album is ponderously paced. This slowness is doubtless meant to convey threat but also suggests a lack of technique. At times the music does indeed (as claimed on the Opium Warlords MySpace page) sound like "a bad Bolivian Metal band practicing a riff" but some patches stir up an odd sense of humans wallowing in mud and leaves a la Samuel Beckett’s story How It Is. The vision is of depressed or wretched ones refusing to stop crawling through crap, even enjoying it. At such times, Opium Warlords’ contemplative, brooding tempo is nicely out of sync with the dizzy but superficial haste of modern life.
Photos on the website show Hynninen from the back, stripped to the waist and wearing a hip-hugging bullet belt and boots. He is slouching near a bare tree and in his right hand is a hardback book which, given its heft, looks rather paradoxically like Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Obviously that’s not the case, but maybe it is a reasonable signal of the dilemmas inherent in approaching this music. For in the year 2010, it is hard to imagine that devil-worship exists as anything more than sexual fetish, nostalgic symbolism or a stance to annoy self-appointed moralists. At the same time, while it is hard to swallow this album with a straight face it is easy to grasp that Hynninen fully realizes both the humor and the paradoxes. On some pieces, such as “Meet Me at The Iron Place” and particular on the urine erotica song "Let it Pour, Let It Pour" he enunciates his words to good effect. Elsewhere his cartoon-constipated grunt voice obscures lyrics which are as likely to divide opinion as Pynchon’s infamous excrement swallowing scene in Gravity’s Rainbow. Luckily, samples of these (images of raw sex, painful depression, fluffy animals and forest mythology) are in an accompanying booklet along with childlike sketches, occult references and an ad for Zyprexa tablets with the requisite (devilish) barcodes.
The repetitive medium-paced instrumental “Feel The Strength” is (at three minutes) much shorter than most of the songs, a few of which could have been trimmed. The sole fast track is “Support the Satanic Youth.” This lasts just five seconds but for some reason I found it genuinely uncomfortable. On the one hand, it’s a laughable, throwaway, incomprehensible speed rant, but that had me half-wondering if the humor is not a double-bluff similar to the circular logic of those Christians who claim that the best trick the devil ever pulled was to convince us that he doesn’t exist. I conclude that, as in the spheres of politics and religion, reality in the world of metal is whatever the participants decide it to be; a handy device.
For all its lumpy predictability, Live at Colonia Dignidad is also heavy and uncompromising in a good way. During some of the slow rambling guitar work, away from the ham-fisted lyrical signifiers, Hynninen stumbles upon mystery. His choice of the name Opium Warlords is terrific, and befitting of the complex and hilarious nature of human “evil.” The name conjures such hidden or murky histories of war and trade as those of the British in China, the French in Vietnam, the heroin labs of Marseille, the Golden Route, and the US involvement with international crime syndicates. It evokes excellent stories such as the release of Lucky Luciano and the role of the Mafia in assisting the Allies in opening a second front in WWII. It reminds of the marvelous saga of Fidel Castro’s exploding cigar, and the less amusing legend of Ollie North’s covert exploits in Colombia and Iran. It hints at recent fables of CIA tolerance for Afghan opium production and export during the US backed Afghanistan war against Russia. But amidst all these, the alleged payment of $43 million to the Taliban government for crushing opium production, just months before the US invasion of Afghanistan with the support of the Afghan opium warlords, may be the most incredible tale of all.*
*Ed Felien: The Big Payoff
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