Led by the powerfully talented and visionary vocalist/songwriter Heidi Parviainen, Finland’s cinematic metal powerhouse Dark Sarah released their fourth studio album, and first of an exciting and exotic new trilogy, Grim, July 17 on Napalm Records.
It is an exemplary work of story craft that infuses an imaginary world of magic and mysticism, of bold characters and thrilling narrative drama with an opera composers’ sense of musical dynamism, enfolded within the confines of exceptionally well-crafted melodic metal.
Dark Sarah is perhaps best described as a creative persona for Parviainen, which she inhabits as she writes, records and performs. It is the name of the central character in the band’s first three albums, all of which were critically lauded, funded by IndieGoGo campaigns, and which were enthusiastically embraced by an ever-increasing and profoundly loyal international fan base.
Formed in 2012, the band’s first three albums were designed as a trilogy, with Behind The Black Veil coming out in 2015, followed a year later by The Puzzle, and wrapped up with The Golden Moth in 2018. One off the road from touring in support of The Golden Moth, Parviainen embarked in her latest creative journey, which began with Grim.
“I didn’t sit down and write the whole trilogy at the same time. I want to give the story time to breathe, because it takes many years, actually, to do. You can’t release more than one album a year, and it takes quite a lot of time to finish this kind of story. I always want to leave myself that openness too because I also feel that for each album I am developing as a writer and as a singer, and our band is also developing in the music world, so I think it would be restrictive to write everything straight away, because I don’t know what kind of characters I want to be on there in a couple years. Although I do have some general idea where this is going,” she explained.
“For now, I already know where the second part of the story is going. And for putting together the record, I start with titles. I always come up with the album title first, and then I sort of start mind mapping what kind of things there would be, maybe some of the characters that I want to have there. Then I start gathering a lot of visual material from Pinterest pages. For me, like a filmmaker, everything starts from creating the world, and creating the mood and everything that I want to be the backdrop and setting for the story.”
A special album release party will be taking place on Aug. 7, with a both a live audience [with Covid-19 protocols in place] as well as streaming live. Besides Parviainen, Dark Sarah is comprised of guitarists Sami-Petri Salonen and Erkka Korhonen, bassist Rude Rothsten and drummer Thomas Tunkkari.
After the trio of albums that focused on the Dark Sarah character and story arc, Parviainen wanted Grim to have a different tone musically and a different sort of voice for the new main character, Luna.
“We have a little bit of a different kind of sound on this album and I am excited about how our older fans are taking this new sound. So far, everything has been really good, but of course there are always these trolls everywhere. You can’t really ever hide from them. I think when you are getting a wider audience, the crowd of trolls also gets bigger, but it’s part of the business. For this album we wanted to have more of a modern sound and replace some of the orchestrations with synth sounds and also digital keyboard sounds. We wanted to try out how they would work in a cinematic metal aspect to create the scenes and images, and I think we managed to do it really well, and I am really digging this album because it has this kind of new feel to it,” she explained.
“And also, because I changed my vocal style for this album too. I thought it would better suit the kind of songs we have to sing them differently than just with an operatic voice. It could be because we are sort of focusing on a new main character, but also when we are creating music, the music part has to be out front. That’s the most important thing to do and think about than just the characters there. This album is not as theatrical as The Golden Moth, our last album. I think there are a lot of these kind of forward going songs on this album, and some of them are maybe a little bit poppy. So, I thought that it would be better to sing in a more pop sound, or at least as pop as I can be as an opera singer.”
Grim is the first part of what will be a new trilogy. Dark Sarah could almost be compared to a film studio in that the band, under Parviainen’s creative mastery and comprehensive approach to musical storytelling, has become superlative at creating trilogies where each album can be taken as a standalone masterwork, but is more accessible as part and parcel of a larger narrative arc.
“For this album, I knew that I wanted to create a horror fantasy story and it was going to be called Grim and I started building it from there where it’s a city called Grim. And then I wondered what’s this new character going to be, because Dark Sarah died at the end of The Golden Moth. I needed to come up with a new character, and I was really excited about this new character because I felt that I needed the changes as the writer too. It’s kind of like building a house brick by brick and also at the same time, I write the synopsis and the skeleton of the story and then I start writing the specific musical pieces. I send the demos to our producer and we pick out the best ones that we start working on further together. It’s very late in the process of making the album that I start writing the lyrics and also the final story line because it’s really tricky to build a good track list of songs so there is a fluidity going with the musical line too, and also that there are the right songs for the different acts of the story,” she explained.
“Grim starts from the moment where Dark Sarah died and she transformed into a golden moth and she flew into space and then the dragon tried to save her but they both ended up into this time loop and landed in this city called Grim in a different period. A witch transformed the moth back into a new human form and she was placed into a tomb to wait for the right time to become fully human and awake again. So this person, Luna wakes up from her tomb and the citizens of Grim have been waiting for this time because they have been living in fear for centuries because there has been this monster called Mörk who has stolen all the magic powers, which are contained in these orbs. These people have been hiding their faces behind rabbit masks and now that Luna has come, they hope she is the one who can save them from this torture. That’s the basic idea. Fear has been living in the hearts of these people for so many centuries that it’s hard to break from it alone, so Luna is there to help them believe in themselves and convince them they are ready to fight back against Mörk and take back their orbs.
“Luna finds these orbs and they revive her magic and her spirit back again, so she comes into her human form and using the orbs starts this fight against Mörk. In the video for the song All Ears we see Luna standing on a podium talking to the people who have been enchanted by her using the green orb, as she is trying to convince them that they need to have dreams and fight for their dreams. Illuminate is the new single and is the name of the second orb Luna finds. It’s purple and summons the powers of the wind and the moon. She asks the moon to illuminate her and revive her magic powers. It’s all setting up for the second album because we really don’t meet Mörk until near the end. It’s kind of a transition album because it gives some answers to the fans who have been asking me what happened to Dark Sarah; did she really die and what happened to the dragon? I felt I owed this to my fans to tell them what happened to the dragon. This album starts a new story, but it also ends the previous story. It’s a good album to start a new chapter.”
To say Parviainen has a vivid, colourful and potent imagination is a bit of an understatement. Her restless creativity comes in waves, and as much as she builds wonderfully compelling aural soundscapes, much of her inspiration and process is actually visual. She ‘sees’ sound in ways that most of us don’t.
“Of course, I am still learning a lot as a music writer. I want to write a lot because that’s part of the learning process. I feel the last group of demos I wrote are so much better than the first ones, that’s why I write 20 to 25 demos and there’s a lot of material to choose from when we start picking out the best ones and what works best for the album. And it’s hard to say if I have a regular process, because it seems that things just pop into my head,” she said.
“It could happen in the grocery store for example. So, it’s not like I am just sitting in my garden and listening to the birds chirping hoping for inspiration, it can come from anything at any time. I just have a wild imagination, like you said. I read a lot when I was young, but there are many of my friends that had read much more than I have. But I read mostly fantasy novels, like Lord of the Rings and later Harry Potter, and I also liked the Stephen King novels and the Dragon Land series, as well as the poems of Edgar Allen Poe. There are many kinds of book series and movies that have affected my imagination and how I see things. And music has always been visual to me. So, when I hear music, I start seeing pictures, I start seeing movies in my mind It’s interesting that Grim is a horror fantasy because I am not much of a horror fan. I actually can’t watch horror movies, because I get nightmares. Grim is more of a dark fantasy and the album is not much of a horror style, but that element will be coming more in future albums.”
“There is a lot of me in every character, I think because I am the one that created them. They are parts of my personality in every one of them, in one way or another. If you’re a writer and you write a lot about a lot of different characters, you need to add something about yourself in them for them to feel real, so I think there’s part of me in every character.”
Besides the album, there is also going to be a corresponding e-book that can be purchased along with the album Grim.
“I always wanted to write something more, because an album is really limited in terms of what you can do with only lyrics. We want to create a whole world and a big story. I don’t want to leave so many questions open for people like I did with the Dark Sarah stories. That’s why I like to write these short stories nest to the albums. This time it’s going to be a poem book called Grim Poems, and I think it will be a worldwide release through digital bookstores as well as our website,” she said, adding that with such a focus on creating cinematic music, Parviainen might be interesting in doing the soundtrack of a movie or even doing an entire movie.
“I haven’t done anything like that yet, but it would be awesome if that could happen. Of course, I would love to make something more cinematic with the story, but really the only guy that I would want to work with for a movie would be Tim Burton. I would love to do something like with the animation in A Nightmare Before Christmas. I think we could come up with enough material; there would have to be a lot more facts and story made up to make it a juicier full movie. I think it would be a really cool thing to do one day. You always need to be dreaming about something.”
For more information on Dark Sarah, Grim, and any post pandemic tour dates, as well as the Aug. 7 release show, visit https://www.darksarah.com/
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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