German power metal was in resurgence in 1996, and its founding band resurged along with it. If Master of the Rings was an uncertain but interesting trial balloon for a new lineup, The Time of the Oath marks the point where they fully recovered. Helloween is back. No caveats, no qualifiers. They are back.

A concept album supposedly inspired by Nostradamus (particularly Quatrain 634: “many metal bands shall blatantly lie about being inspired by Nostradamus”), it was their longest studio album up to this point, aside from Chameleon. It definitely feels very long, and arguably moves with too slow a step. The final three songs are all epics, running 20 minutes in total. At times it’s exhausting, like listening to latter-day Iron Maiden.

But it’s music of grandeur, music of the ages. It feels weighty and massive, ringing out like a huge bronze bell. Obviously the two Keeper albums are holy classics, but the goddamn things end as soon as you put it on. By contrast, Time of the Oath is a deep pool you can sink into like a stone. It has humor and lightness and deftness: the large number of songs allows them to explore many tones and moods. Not all of these work, but in online forums I’ve often found myself defending its flaws, which I’ve grown to like.

“We Burn” is a scorching fireball of an opener, and “Steel Tormentor” is scarcely any slower. Deris drives these songs with his trademark verve and attitude, snarling around the microphone like a wolf. “Wake up the Mountain” opens with a Niagara-like torrent of notes from Roland Grapow. Time of the Oath marks the last time he tried to be Yngwie Malmsteen on guitar, before settling into a more blues-influenced style. The rest of the song is a stately midtempo rocker that reminds me of Rainbow.

Andi Deris dominates the songwriting here, composing two of the three best songs, “We Burn” and “Before the War”. The latter is a raging power-metal track that rolls the clock back to 1985, when Walls of Jericho came out. Kai Hansen would be proud to have written this (although he already had much to be proud of—Gamma Ray really hits its stride around 1996, too).

The album gets a bit weak in the middle. “Kings Will Be Kings” and “Power” have never especially grabbed me, and “Anything My Mama Don’t Like” is a pointless Deris-written hard rock song. Michael Weikath’s “Mission Motherland” is a lyrically and musically ambitious ode to panspermia: at nine minutes, it has its moments (some tempo changes keep things varied), but if you find the end of the album too much work, this is the one to skip. Weikath’s best song here might be the bluesy ballad “If I Knew”.

But then we get to the greatest thing album has to offer, Roland Grapow’s “Time of the Oath”. It has a grinding Zeppelin-esque set of riffs, a fantastically dense atmosphere, some spine-tingling choirs, and an electrifying vocal performance from Deris. “My sweetest memories…die in the cold!” Here’s where he conclusively demonstrates that he’s not just a spare tire until Michael Kiske 2.0 shows up, but Helloween’s new singer.

Helloween, for me, is not a band about speed and heaviness but about charm, and Time of the Oath ranks as one of their more charming releases. The songwriting, backed by Grapow and Weikath’s brittle Marshall crunch and Uli Kusch’s raw-sounding drums, has a deliberately and defiantly old-school flavor. The apocalypse described in the lyrics was sweeping over the industry like death, and here was Helloween, having the last laugh. The 90s were half-over, grunge was collapsing, and this defiantly 80s band was still here, playing power metal for all who wanted to hear it.

I love how this asshole died eight films ago and here we are, looking at his “Eminem through an Instagram aging filter” face in yet another one. I love how Saw 3D was marketed as “the final chapter” and three new sequels have been made since then. Saw has devolved into a Weekend at Bernie‘s farce where the creators have ended the series multiple times—and I mean publically murdered it, dynamited the corpse, and fired the ashes into the sun—only for the studio to carry on making more Saws anyway, like nothing happened. Kind of funny. I guess it’s our fault for seeing them.

I realize I’m watching a Saw movie in 2023 and the joke is on me, but can’t they try? A movie is an unexplored frontier: 60-180 minutes of blank space, and you can fill that space with anything. There are no rules. Tape doesn’t care what you put on it. With that in mind, why are we doing this again?

X is better than most movies in the Saw series, but that’s not hard (there will never be a Better Than Most Movies in the Saw Series award at the Oscars) and it still struggles with the fact that the franchise killed its one and only idea 620 minutes ago. Without John Kramer, there’s nothing, so they need to keep bringing him back, using increasingly contrived methods. Saw X is actually Saw 1.5: set between the events of Saw and Saw II. Kramer, you will recall, is dying of cancer (which I believe: Tobin Bell looks 20 years older than he did in the first film), so he undertakes an experimental new treatment procedure at a clinic in Mexico. The clinic turns out to be a fraudulent scam, preying on the desperate and gullible. Kramer decides to get revenge on them before he dies.

Setting the film in the past creates its own set of continuity problems (didn’t the Mexican Federales notice such gruesomely distinctive crimes, and draw parallels to the American Jigsaw killer?), but it doesn’t matter: the franchise long ago abandoned realism. In particular, Kramer is absurd. Once he was merely a super-genius, now he’s literally God, possessing perfect omniscience, knowing everything about everyone, and predicting the moves of others six steps ahead. While dying of cancer he designs and builds room-sized torture machines that would take a team of MIT undergrads six months and millions of dollars to construct. He’s such an unbelievable figure that it destroys what was interesting about the first movie: its sense of psychological realism.

The franchise has changed since the James Wan days. The first Saw had little gore, and was a “smart” horror/crime thriller in the mould of Se7en/Silence of the Lambs. Later entries dipped their toes into various horror fads such as splatterpunk, and found footage. Now we’re in the era of tedious “prestige horror”, so we get hokey scenes of Kramer fixing some Mexican kid’s bike, just to show he has a heart. I liked it more when he was a bad guy.

But that’s the problem with any horror franchise: the monster eventually becomes the hero. In the first Saw, your sympathies lay with the poor schmucks screwed into John Kramer’s machines. They were flawed, but redemption was possible. But now? Kramer is the star of the show, so they make his victims loathsome scum who basically deserve to die horribly. But if I no longer care if they live or die, what’s the point?

The Mexican setting is a waste—the film is as visually bland as ever—and aside from the expected “Hello Zepp” drop the music sounds like temp tracks. The plot makes little sense. Greutert directs like he’s assembling Ikea furniture. No inspiration exists. The Saw franchise is beyond dead and beyond a joke and they should either stop making them or be forced to stop. At least the title is accurate: this sawx.

One of Calvino’s later works, Under the Jaguar Sun aims to do the thing that’s hardest for the writer: touch the reader’s senses.

Books have a distancing effect: to read one, we imagine ourselves out of our bodies, and into the scene depicted on the page. Under the Jaguar Sun wants to short-circuit us back into our meatsacks using specifically-written stories about taste, smell, and sound. Not sight and touch, notably. Calvino never completed those. In an afterword, his wife urges us to think of the three written stories, and forget the two unwritten ones. (In any case, there are more than five senses).

The first story in the cycle is “taste”, or Sotto il sole giaguaro. A pair of tourists explore Mexican locales such as Tepoztlán and Monte Alban, eating local cuisine such as chiles en nogada and guajolote con mole poblano while reflecting on the history of the region. Conflicting flavors are used to symbolize religious and political strife, as well as possibly their own sexual tension. Calvino focuses on the exterior state of the characters: we’re meant to infer things from Olivia’s flaring nostrils, or the pause of her lips. Soon the narrator isn’t staring at his partner’s eyes, but at her teeth.

He suspects that she may want to eat him, driving fangs through the softness of his skin, as a jaguar might. His mind fills with bloody images: cut-out hearts, and blood steaming upon temple altars. I wonder if there are things not said: and that food is a distraction for something unspeakable about their relationship.

The prose of William Weaver’s translation is itself a bit too rich at times, evoking those terrible cooking blogs (“…somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender”). I could have done with less of that, but I was relieved that the characters can’t remember if cilantro is the same thing as coriander.

Eating is described as an act of travel. You are digesting a country and its history—and if that history is a bloody one, what effect will eating have on you? Calvino (through his narrator) scorns the poor imitations of “regional” food found in big restaurants, which he considers as fake as stage dressing on a movie set. But Mexico isn’t what it once was. The narrator imagines the hot, ancient land that Cortez once walked through…but that place doesn’t doesn’t exist anymore. He’s just summarizing ruins, inventorying echoes of echoes. He prizes “real” food because that’s the only form of reality available to him.

Un re in ascolto is the next story, themed upon “hearing”. It’s a lot of fun, much better than the first, with some great writing and the same twisted fairytale quality of Marcel Schwob. It also reminded me of the Truman Show.

A king sits upon a throne, a virtual prisoner. His crown is uncomfortable but he cannot move his head to adjust it. His scepter is heavy but it must never leave his hand. His throne doubles as a bedpan so he can relieve himself without ever being out of sight of his adoring subjects. In short, he might as well be made of glass. He’s inactive, defunct, just a monarch-object who exists to sit and be admired by the court until his death.

Which might come sooner rather than later. Despite existing under such pitiless, endless love, the king knows he is surrounded by enemies. Whether he’s right or merely paranoid doesn’t matter to us. He’s convinced that men are plotting and scheming in court: the palace is full of his spies, but they cannot catch everyone, and although reams of surveillance and interrogation are piled at his feet, there is too much of it to read.

With his eyes useless, he relies on hearing. The king learns to enjoy the sound of the wind blowing along the corridors; the sound of the guards slamming rifle butts in salute on the battlements. And soon, beyond the baldaquin of his hollow coffin-throne, the king hears a woman singing a love song…

It’s a good one—maybe a great one—about paranoia and suspicion and obsession. It made me feel closed-in and itchy. Uneasy hangs the head that wears the crown? No, it’s the ears beneath the crown that are the trouble. They keep complicating things.

Lastly comes Il nome, il naso, or “smell”. It’s a wild, decadent romp, braiding together three separate stories and letting strange things happen from their union. We get the perspectives of a wild beast, a French decadent rather like Huysmans’ Jean des Esseintes, and a drug-addicted musician. They are united by search for sensation, which is most potent in the form of olfaction.

It’s the shortest but also the messiest of the stories, and I can’t say I understood much of it. But that might be entirely appropriate: smell is the most fragile and easily overwhelmed of the senses, for me. The eyes see endlessly, the ears hear endlessly, and both touch and taste . But scents, however, quickly go dead. I’m not sure that I’d want to live in a world where the nose is king, but that’s the point of the story, we once did. And maybe there’s something latent there, hidden in our DNA and ready to become manifest.

This is an intimate and voluptous volume, and the fact that it’s incomplete reveals something important about senses: they often go away. A single lesion in the brain might take one (or more) of them away, silencing a world of meaning. In this book, we are blind and anaphiac. Sometimes we understand. Sometimes we grope in confusion.

It’s worth reading if you can find it cheap, and it encapsules much of what made Calvino great as a writer. It sets fires in the mind, and opens the imagination to worlds and words beyond, barely glimpsed off the margins of the page.