By Martin Popoff
"Yes, there's quite a bit of humour," confirms Sami. "There are a couple of songs that are actually nothing more than black humor, like 'Excuse Me While I Kill Myself'. Of course you can already see from the title that this song is not to be taken that seriously. It's a song where we wanted to take our suicidal bad boy image and really take it over the edge with this kind of lyric. And the reason for this is that we have often been presented only as a suicidal band and we are much more than just that. In my eyes, we have always been more than that. Those who have read our lyrics closely have probably noticed that we actually sing more about life than about death. Death is a natural part of each life, and that's why it is often very much present in our lyrics. And the other humorous song is 'The Luxury Of A Grave', which is also something that... I don't know, if someone takes this kind of stuff seriously, maybe he or she should look in the mirror and see if something is wrong."
Not so much humour, but something we might call barbed irony, is embedded in the Sentenced sound itself, something Sami defines thusly. "Well, melodies are the first thing for us; melodies are the music, and without melodies, there is no music, just bullshit noise. And of course, the lyrics are pretty important to us as well. And also, we like to build big contrasts between the music and lyrics, so even when you hear something that you might think is joyful or almost happy, the lyrics go in a very gloomy direction. So you have this pretty weird combination."
Like Sami sez, you can't deny the death in life, nor can you deny it in the sly Sentenced sensibility. Sami is in fact studying the Finnish language and linguistics, and that has led him to a predictable place. "Well, I've been studying metaphors of death in the Finnish language. I've written about a hundred pages on that. And there are some really beautiful expressions in Finnish considering death and dying in general. And those are probably the most interesting things to me, while I've been studying."
SENTENCED - Whisper To Me, O Death Page 3