In 2004, George Bush campaigned for re-election. Musicians wrote songs about it. And about about him. “Songs about how he was cool and awesome and doing a great job?” Well, you’d think so but in many cases it was the opposite, actually.
At the time, I was a poster on a gaming forum. I remember watching a 3-page thread erupt overnight about something called American Idiot by Green Day. It was controversial, although few people had a clear grasp on why. A long, annoying “debate” followed—unsullied by the slightest contact of anything resembling a fact—about whether the album was offensive, or to whom it was offensive, or whether *all* Americans were being called idiots, or just *some* Americans, or whether it even mattered, and so on. The band’s name was spelled twelve different ways—I got a kick out of “Green’s Day”.
This was my first (indirect) exposure to protest art and the (non) reaction it usually inspires. I was watching gamers perform rote poses of shock, indignation, and defensiveness they’d seen in others, while clearly not actually caring that much. Many had evidently not heard the album, and were relying on second hand outrage. A provocative gesture had just rocked mass culture: that much was clear. They knew they had to react. But the provocation had no meaning for them.
This aligns with an oft-repeated claim about the Bush years: the kids were fucked. Vast teeming numbers of the young were politically disengaged, if they even cared, they were stuck repeating the talking points of others, mimicking the shadows of outraged adults on Plato’s wall. A friend of mine once said “it’ll suck when they make Boomer-style documentaries about our generational moment—instead of the Beatles and Woodstock, it’ll be about Bush and financial crimes.” He had a point. By 2004, Bush stood revealed as a thousandfold joke, and the case for war was sagging like piss-soaked paper before our eyes. Vietnam 2.0 could and should have produced Counterculture 2.0—an articulate, mobilized, and ultimately successful youth reaction to the war. We could actually top the boomers—we could stop the war before it even began! Wouldn’t that be nuts? Wouldn’t that be crazy?
It was. None of that happened. On the eve of war, a massive protest came and went and achieved nothing. Subsequent ones were much smaller. They also achieved nothing. Soon after, the antiwar movement fizzled out, as though it was a dead carcass and nobody had the energy to keep carrying it forward. Bush did not win in Iraq, but he won against us. Coalition forces would remain in Iraq for the next nine years.
No, nobody would cite any part of the Iraq war as America’s finest hour. And obviously kids are not to blame. But the failure of the protests is particularly depressing to think about. Why did they fail so miserably? What had changed since Vietnam?
Conscription, I guess. The antiwar protests of the 60s and 70s were fueled by the draft: as a service-age man, you couldn’t remain unengaged. Vietnam could easily become your war. In the years following Operation Rolling Thunder, thousands of young men were going overseas and filling coffins, millions more scrambled to secure college deferments, and you were ignorant about Vietnam at your mortal peril. People had to care, because politics (as the cliche goes) cared about them. The defining act of protest became the burning of a draft card.
But active conscription ended in 1973, and the threat of dying in a ditch in Buôn Ma Thuột disappeared. Youth vote turnout collapsed. Throughout the 1960s, the youth vote turnout stood at around ~35% for congressional elections. It dropped nearly ten percentage points in 1974, and continued to fall from there. War in foreign countries became an increasingly abstract thing—I remember the joke about Iraq was that America couldn’t find the country they were invading on a map. A decades-long dumbening process had rippled like an earthquake through Gen X: they’d dropped out, but had failed to turn on or tune in.
(Another thing: the Vietnam war escalated over many years, and the protests slowly snowballed to match it. Organizers like SANE and the Young Socialist Alliance received years of runway with which to build networks, scale up logistic capacity, and learn valuable lessons about putting bodies in front of gears. By contrast, the Iraq protests were rapidly-organized and front-loaded in attendance: their massive initial size proved unsustainable. After a gigantic protest on 15 February 2003, numbers fell off a cliff. It didn’t help that the initial stage of the invasion went really well, with the Coalition taking Baghdad after three weeks. Could it be that things would work out, after all? No. It couldn’t.)
And by 2003-2004, the internet was maturing into its current form: a ruiner of everything. It cheapened the value of protest art and satire, making rebellious gestures easy and meaningless. There’s only about six different jokes you can make about Bush, and if you had a 56k modem, you too could hear them repeated a dozen times a day. It got to the point where I just didn’t want to hear anything at all about Iraq or war or US politics. It just seemed like a radio tuned to static: with no signal and no meaning poking through the hiss. The Vietnam protests benefited from this lack of an omnipresent scream-machine. One Timothy Leary speech or Mickey Mouse in Vietnam is a rare, valuable artifact. A million is just a sea of noise. The nonstop news cycle around Iraq felt like a dry-run for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If I see Trump’s face on a news story, I click off. I’m sorry. I’ve had enough. His name exists in a numbed-out part of my brain, worn dead through overuse, and has ceased to mean anything. I will talk about American Idiot now.
There are two ways you can look at this record. The first is as a piece of music. On that front, it’s great! I fully listened to American Idiot on a car drive the other day. It has fine, fine, fine songs. Particularly “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (which I remember hearing before). No complaints there.
I know a guy who was friends with Billie Joe Armstrong growing up, and reports that he’s actually a guitar prodigy who plays the music he plays as a conscious choice. I believe this. There’s all these subtle fingerprints all over the music (and a fussy sense of perfectionist micromanagement), which you hardly notice because of how violent, visceral and blood-drenched Rob Cavallo’s mix is. There is incredible craft on display here. It’s not kids fooling around, it’s smart adults dressed up as kids fooling around. The album is all the better for it. Would that the Iraq war itself had been this thoroughly planned.
But American Idiot is also a protest album. What is it protesting? For that, we turn to the lyrics of its infamous title track:
Overseas, yeah, we tryna stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin’
In the USA, the big CIA
(…)
Why are there pieces of love that don’t belong?
Nations droppin’ bombs
Chemical gases filling lungs of little ones
With ongoing sufferin’ as the youth die young
So ask yourself, is the lovin’ really gone?
(…)
A war is goin’ on, but the reason’s undercover
The truth is kept secret, and swept under the rug
If you never know truth, then you never know love
Actually, those are lyrics to “Where is the Love” by the Black Eyed Peas. Mangement regrets the error. Here are the lyrics to “American Idiot”.
Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America
Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue
Okay, what is this song saying? There’s a new kind of tension. Tension over what, though? Is it a good or a bad thing, that people are feeling tension? Is the band for or against said tension? I don’t know.
Lyrically, I was struck by how…unconnected to reality the album seems. It’s just punches slung out in a dark room. Billie Joe never sounds that angry, and never sounds like he’s singing about anything in particular. Yes, I’m sure he was (and is). But the intense clarity of message you get on Vietnam-era protest records (like Phil Ochs) is not present on *American Idiot*. No wonder the gamers on that long-moribund forum were confused. Heard out of context, you’d never guess “American Idiot” was about the 2004 election. In 2016, Billie Joe Armstrong made the song about Trump by changing literally *two words*. For better or for worse, the song was always a cipher.
For me, it’s “worse”. Slamming 3-chord pop punk doesn’t really benefit from subtlety. Fuck abstract interpretation, I wanna know which Coalition-owned IPC pipelines Green Day want their fans to bomb, you get me?
The closest Billie Joe Legweak gets to naming and shaming the guilty is his mention of the “redneck agenda”, plus a “faggot” or two. (I learned while writing this that he is bisexual).
But does this connect with its target? I am unsure. George Bush was not a yee-haw cowbow redneck: he ran on compassionate conservativism. Yes, in February 2004 he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but also supported civil unions—his views on gay marriage were broadly in line with the mainstream opinion of the Democratic Party (including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) circa 2004-2008. It’s difficult to find quotes from him on the subject, beyond rote pablum about how the institution of marriage must be respected. It simply wasn’t a major cornerstone of his campaign or his presidency. Certainly not a stick to beat him with on the same scale as, say, the intelligence failure in Iraq.
It’s also striking that American Idiot—for all its anti conservative bombast—is musically as conservative as it gets. Ignore the lyrics: if music could vote, this album voted for Bush and then wore a fake mustache to vote for Bush a second time.
The title track is a shameless Sex Pistols nostalgia-fest: Johnny Rotten’s vocal rhythm (“I don’t wanna holiday in the sun” -> “don’t wanna be an American Idiot”) sung over the main riff of “Pretty Vacant”. It’s followed closely by a song called “Holiday”, just in case the album’s musical forbears aren’t clear.
Which strangely, they aren’t. The album is sold as the force that brought pop punk back to the mainstream, but it actually has a surprising amount of conceptual, rock opera storytelling as well. It’s more of a piece with Meat Loaf and Bruce Springsteen than, say, Blink 182 (let alone DRI or Black Flag). “Jesus of Suburbia” is a collage of musical quotes slashed out with a Bowie knife (I noticed references to “Life on Mars?”, “Time”, and “Moonage Daydream”). You could rebuild the bulk of this album out of 1972-77’s scavenged parts. Is this the voice of the downtrodden youth? The most recent musical reference is to Oasis’s “Wonderwall” in “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”.
To be clear, I have no qualm with conservative music. We should honor and respect the traditions of the past (as said Bush about marriage)…but I have to be honest: Green Day seldom live up to their inspirations, and direct comparison usually does not flatter them.
Green Day are not the Sex Pistols, and the title track’s forced, direct comparison does not flatter them. “American Idiot” is a force to be reckoned with in isolation, but if you’ve heard John Lydon’s glottal-reinforced “ANTI-CHRISSSSTT-UGHH”—with epenthesis *spat out* like a wad of phlegm in his throat—it sounds so square you could play chess on it. Billie Joe Armstrong is certainly no Meat Loaf in the vocal department; and where Jim Steinman really leans his whole ass into Wagnerian rock opera shtick, Green Day seem to lose interest in theirs halfway through. And attempting to imitate Bowie is a contradiction of terms—Bowie’s whole persona was a lifelong spirit-quest to not ever sound like himself.
The album was a success, and largely rescued pop punk from the clearance bin. (It was a runway for My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade in particular, and I remember Sum 41, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne also doing solid trade in its wake). I am not sure it takes much courage to be a punk band and strike a generic “fuck the government” pose. Not after The Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson took their anti-Bush messaging into the lion’s den of the Nashville country music market. But maybe bravery wasn’t the point.
I kept hoping for a more concrete and focused lyric. Instead, they’re more like Mad Libs you fill in with your own anger. (If anything, conspiratorial tropes about media mind control have aged uneasily in the Trump era). These are very much what you’d expect the lyrics of a Bush protest album to sound like, if it were written by 14 year old kids on a videogame forum whose level of cultural engagement was “whats a green day??” It is angry in a way that feels shallow and rote and fill-in-the-blanks.
The charitable read is that Billie Joe wanted to respect the listener’s anger. He didn’t want to crowd out their anger by forcing his own upon them.
The uncharitable read is that he felt that getting too specific would alienate people (across the alienation) and perhaps invite actual censorship. So he played it safe and made a record about confusion and ignorance instead. Which is fair: both are common reactions to war, and not even wrong reactions. How did you first hear about 9/11? Someone came up to me and blurted “A PLANE HIT A BUILDING IN AMERICA AND A MILLION PEOPLE ARE DEAD!” Tally up the carnage of the next decade, and he wasn’t far wrong.
A kid is frequently just a lock waiting for a key. In 2006, I found my key when I discovered Rob Zombie. I became obsessed with his music: he was the only thing I thought of for about a year.
I went deeper on him than anyone should go without a fedora and a $200-a-day-plus-expenses account, making it my business to know about every obscure B-side, every film soundtrack contribution, and every guest appearance. I knew that “Dragula” was originally titled “West of Zanzibar”. I knew about the infamous La Sexorcisto promo cassette which contains extra samples cut from the final album because of usage rights (here’s some of it). I knew which scenes in House of 1000 Corpses were filmed in Rob Zombie’s apartment after the budget ran out. I even defended Educated Horses on internet forums, which is like waving a saber and making a Banzai charge for a nation that has already surrendered. An early version of this site was named after a Rob Zombie track.
At a certain point, the key no longer fit the lock.
What happened? I grew older, and listened more broadly to metal and punk. I heard the original issue: things like Killing Joke and Ministry and Siouxsie Sioux made Rob Zombie seem like a plastic knockoff with a ‘made in China’ sticker. I noticed things about his persona which suddenly struck me as lazy or shlocky or contrived. As late as 2009, I would have still cited him as my favorite musician. But I’d officially become that fan: the one who writes one word of love for every nine words of criticism.
In 2010, I had to face the facts. Rob (after a few years of making unwatchable Halloween cheapquels for Dimension) had returned to music with Hellbilly Deluxe 2. I listened to the lead single “What” and didn’t like it. Then I streamed the album, and found myself skipping around with a weird mix of disinterest and panic slamming in my chest. Things had shifted, and I hadn’t known it.
Yes, “Sick Bubblegum” and “Werewolf Women of the SS” made me smile. “Mars Needs Women” grew on me. The rest just seemed like overly complicated and fussy arrangements of nothing. Boring. Longeurs from a fading shock-rocker who once grabbed and chokeslammed your limbic system. Huh, I thought to myself, I guess I’m just not a fan of this guy anymore.
Around the same time, I’d noticing a trend of fans being unusually prone to turn into haters further down the line (and the bigger the fan, the bigger the hater). The defining example of Fan-to-Hater Syndrome is DawnOWar, an obsessive Manowar fangirl who knew the band since the 80s, ran their website for years and years…and now has no involvement with the band beyond trashing them from every social media website that will platform her. From her Facebook page:
Manowar canceled Detroit! I see this as a victory! Maybe Manowar fans are finally going to stop letting the band rip them off.
Manowar fans complain endlessly about Joey wasting time on stage with his endless stupid long-winded speeches, so hes decided to go on tour without a band and charge $50 for the privilege of seeing him do just the part everyone hates the most. I feel like now is a good time to let your tomatoes start rotting so theyll be ready for throwing when he comes to your town.
This group is not very active but disgruntled Manowar fans PM me all the time to tell me whatever stupid thing the band or the fans did today. I quit working for Manowar at the end of 1999 because they’re jerks. Thank goodness I don’t have a need to still discuss it ad nauseum. Because thats shit that happened to me 15 fucking years ago. But I set up this group to unite the people who do have a need for this discussion. Because they are assholes, you have been suckered out of your money, and they havent been good since 1987. So post that shit here. Its what its for. Don’t PM me to tell me theyre jerks. Believe me, I know. I’ve known for 15 years. Thanks.
I never ended up disliking Rob Zombie this much. But the “fan to hater” pipeline has cast-iron welds and seldom leaks.
I think fans turn on their idols for a few reasons. Hyperfixated fans tend to be extremely aware of flaws in their God. It’s the scribal priest’s lot to copy translation errors in the Torah, after all. They also are extremely aware of the unsavory parts of their idol: the stuff that gets swept under the rug. Every famous person has scandals and drama in their past (or present): the superfan’s dubious reward is to sooner or later discover where these skeletons are buried.
Also, most musicians have public personas that are partly fake: they neither represent who the artist truly is, nor survive close scrutiny even on their own terms.
A gay listener seeking “representation” can’t avoid noticing that all of David Bowie’s public relationships have been with women, that all of Katy Perry’s public relationships have been with men. Depressed introverts always turn out to be media-savvy hypemen and self-promoters behind the scenes. Quirky oddballs always turn out to be quite sane and normal. The persona is often what attracts the fan in the first place: but the more you stare, the more fake and hollow the persona becomes (and where does that leave your love?)
Obviously Rob Zombie’s “thrifted from a Halloween store on November 1” aesthetic is a shameless, gleeful celebration of fakery in all its positive forms. That’s not an issue. But other things about his life might also be untruthful. There was a fascinating Reddit comment that I sadly can’t find now (referenced here) kind of picking apart his often-told “I was with a travelling carnival as a kid and saw a man get murdered with a hammer” story, arguing (believably) that it was implausible for such an event to happen in a small community without being reported in the news, and that some other parts of Rob’s given history are also unlikely to have happened as he describes them (that they are heavily embellished, at best). I do not know the full truth of this, but no star can help but to be a real person, and usually a far more boring one than the one they pretend to be.
While I never hated Rob Zombie like DawnOWar hates the band that she once loved enough to name her internet handle after, I quickly realized I was no longer very interested in him. This was part of a growing process—one that inevitably led to me quite enjoying Rob Zombie again. Such is the path of enlightenment.
Anyway, shall we discuss the album?
It finds Rob re-convening with most of the same guys who gave us the all-filler-no-killer midsterpiece Educated Horses: drummer Tony Clufetos, producer, and (most worryingly) guitarist John 5.
I have mixed feelings about John 5. He is a guitar virtuoso but not a compelling writer of riffs or melodies, as any of his fourteen or so solo albums will demonstrate. His bluesy, elaborate, tasteful style never meshed well with Rob’s vocals. (Happily, Mike Riggs and his simple caveman style are now back in the band, and the three songs released from the upcoming The Great Satan sound absolutely fantastic.)
Rob is not really a musician. That’s an important detail to understand. He arranges and produces and makes loops and supplies the overall artistic vision, but he does not actually write music. I remember this quote from Astro Creep 2000 guitarist Jay Yuenger on Rob’s songwriting “process”.
Later, around the time we were making Astro-Creep and after, Rob started to really hate anything with any kind of melody in it – he was always saying, “Can’t you just go ‘chunka chunka’ there?”, and I’d say, “This isn’t a drum, it’s a GUITAR, it’s got NOTES” He’d want to use techno loops for everything, cut all the music out of it, and that was a situation which went from difficult to impossible.
So that’s the outer limit of Rob’s musical skills: telling guitarists to go “chunka-chunka”. He is heavily constrained by the musicians he chooses to work with. Fun guitarist equals fun record. Boring guitarist equals boring record. This album has John 5, hence it is quite boring.
The album has little of the fun electronic/industrial loops that characterize the classic White Zombie sound. It’s just straight-ahead heavy metal for the most part. It is a bit more elaborate and arranged than Educated Horses, and there’s a primal heavy whallop that’s nice to hear again after acoustic guitars or whatever.
But it’s ultimately just not fun. It’s dated and unengaging: a churn of guitar sludge, over dry drum beats that move at a sauropod’s pace. It simultaneously sounds empty and overstuffed with surface details.
Tedious Down/Black Label Society backwash like “Jesus Frankenstein” and “Virgin Witch” and “Burn” scream and vulcanize with guitar overdubs: flashy fretboard wizardry that ultimately feels like car keys being jangled in front of your face: these songs have nothing interesting going on at a structural level. The riffs are lazy bluesy affairs that sound like things any beginner guitarist could come up in their second or third month of playing. The drumming is pedestrian. The musical ideas are all obvious, borrowed, and done to death. Listening to this music feels like wandering through a dry and parched desert.
“What” is stale Misfits worship with a blaring farfisa organ and a lo-fi, bitcrushed-to-fuck vocal track (another trick Rob has used since the White Zombie days, though now it finally grows old). It seeks to conjure a live and raw monster-punk energy, but Scott Humphrey’s overbearing wall-of-sound production does not ever feel like a band playing. It’s as unconvincing as the fake crowd noises in “Jesus Frankenstein”.
“Werewolf Baby” rocks out with bland and instantly-forgettable slide guitar that kind of sums why John 5 didn’t work in this band. Yes, he supplies some “diverse” elements (Rob was fond of stating that his guitarist could play any style of music), but it’s always the most generic, lifeless version of whatever that thing is. Want bluegrass picking that’s boring? Banjo strumming that’s boring? Arpeggio runs that are boring? John 5 is your huckleberry.
“Death and Destiny Inside The Dreams Factory” is just “What” again. A grim studio confection trying to imitate a live band playing—trying so hard you can see sweat dripping from the sound engineer’s fingers. More distorted vocals. More random guitar overdubs and punch-ins to disguise a lack of ideas.
The three songs I mentioned earlier are pretty good and basically pull their weight. “Werewolf Women of the SS” is a fun “Misirlou” knockoff, though (like the rest of the album) it feels a few bpm too slow. “Mars Needs Women” and “Sick Bubblegum” slap pretty hard. I also don’t mind “The Man Who Laughs”, which is nicely arranged and strung. It avoids Rob’s longstanding distaste of guitar solos by giving Tommy Clufetos a…drum solo. Talk about out of the frying pan.
Real talk, though: there is no “Dragula” and no “Scum of the Earth” and no “Electric Head Pt.1 (The Agony)” and no “Black Sunshine”. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it doesn’t even have a “Let It All Bleed Out” (one of Educated Horses‘ rare Ws). If you like any of the above music, keep moving, traveller. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Nothing beside remains.
Rob himself was seemingly dissatisfied with the album. In 2011, he released a new version, with some new songs. All are quite bad.
“Devil’s Hole Girls And The Big Lack of Inspiration” is a faded Xerox of “Superbeast” with some snarls and attitude but no real hooks or catchiness. There is nothing else to say about it. I hope nobody had to give up too much of their Sunday afternoon to get this one recorded and in the can.
“Everything Is Boring” is a rare piece of social commentary—musically it’s a drab miserable slog, as unwanted as black water regurgitated from your shower drain (and equally unpleasant to wade through). The socially-aware lyrics fail to land, as both the song and the album exemplify everything Rob is complaining about.
The reissue also removes the drum solo from “The Man Who Laughs” (possibly because Tommy Clufetos was out of the band). It is replaced it with several minutes of almost transcendentally uninteresting mandolin strumming (presumably from John 5) that literally sounds like those AI-generated “10 hour Appalachian folk mix to relax to” flooding Youtube.
The matter of “worst song of the album” is resoundingly locked up by “Michael”, which is basically unlistenable and a career lowlight. “Mama, why do I want to kill you?” Oh, shut up. This song is hateful. This is what cancer has regular early prostate exams to detect.
Rob has released better music both before and after this album (though far more in the “before” column, if we’re being honest). But it did introduce me to certain realizations about art and fandom, and for this, I am thankful. Intense fascination can disappear in an instant (or sour to hatred), and probably only stems from emotional problems. Go listen to your inner child: they’re probably less dull than “Cease to Exist” and “Everything is Boring.”
Helloween’s 2007 release sees them reborn for the second time in as many decades. They became the power metal Jesus, except they did it twice. Which makes it even better. (With due respect to J-Man, is it too much to ask to die two or three times, just to put the issue beyond doubt? One resurrection may just be luck.)
It’s among their most aggressive albums. Although it doesn’t have the downtuned crush of The Dark Ride or the demented aggression of Seven Sinners, it’s still a fury. Guitars are thick and rip at you like hypersonic winds. Every song seems on the verge of stripping its bolts with sheer energy. Charlie Bauerfind gives it a rough-and-ready “too much” production style that the songs really lean into.
To be clear, Gambling is not a full return to form. There are still too many cooks per square inch of kitchen, some blatantly weak tracks, and far too much fiddling with the dials (the syrupy keyboard tone Matthias Ülmer attempts on “Final Fortune” is a self-conscious modernism that doesn’t make sense with the raw Marshall tone of the guitars). And the album cover is, of course, decrepit. The pentagram on the floor doesn’t even match the one on the roulette wheel. Satan’s leaving their asses on read.
2007 was also the year I began listening to power metal. My first Helloween song was “As Long As I Fall”, this album’s lead single. And I hated it. About two years later, I gave the band (and this album) another try, and realized it was the worst song on the album. There’s some truly sublime stuff on here.
Opening song “Kill It” is so simple it makes “Mrs God” from the last album sound like progressive rock, but it thrashes hard and destroys your neck. The black metal-inspired bridge (??) is a creative idea that absolutely works, which is not something I say often about the band’s creative experiments.
The greatest track of the album—perhaps the greatest post-2000 Helloween song—is the fast and melodic “The Saints”. Someone should piss-test this song. It just isn’t normal. It just explodes out of the gates with heavy, modern riffwork, the verses contort and build, the chorus is straight out of 1989, and the duelling guitar solos showcase every trick Sascha Gerstner and Michael Weikath know as they swing axes at each others’ heads. Anything you could possibly enjoy about Helloween, past or present, is in this song. A marvel.
The lyrics seem to be referencing legal corruption, and are delivered with snarl and bite by Deris. The microphone probably had to be destroyed after he expelled so much venom onto it. He was an unusual choice to replace Michael Kiske, but tracks like “The Saints” make powerful arguments that he was the right choice.
Sascha Gerstner’s “Paint a New World” and “Dreambound” are more speed material, with the second being the better of the two. Deris’s “The Bells of the Seven Hells” is an agitated uptempo thrasher with a diabolic vocal performance. “IME” is another great Deris-penned track, full of angst and piss and rage.
A large pile of bonus songs round things out, some of them better than the actual songs on the album. “Find My Freedom” is a great faster track. “See the Night” opens with “Born into a neighborhood that ain’t exactly rich / Never knew his father and his mother was a bitch!”. Which is, uh, better than I could write in German, I suppose. “We Unite” is another fierce, barnburning anthem.
On the other (more limp-wristed) hand, “As Long As I Fall” opens with an insipid keyboard tinkle that sounds like it was recorded to test sound levels and an awful buzzkill of a chorus. “Helloween plays Christian rock” is kind of a Roko’s Basilisk for me—a concept I don’t need in my head. It’s Deris’s songwriting at its worst, just as “Kill It” sees him at his best. “Can Do It” is another “Heavy Metal Hamsters”—a songwriting well the band continually draws from, never with any success. A blandly brainless KISS-style party rock song, it’s better skipped over. Grosskopf’s “Heaven Tells No Lies” is Kim-Kardashian’s-ass-sized album filler that bounces around for seven minutes. “Fallen to Pieces” is a ballad with a fast section questionably integrated. “Final Fortune” is just a flat line of cliches. There is no way this song took any longer for Markus Grosskopf to write than it took me to listen to.
There’s about 35 minutes of good-to-great material on Gambling with the Devil. And the weak tracks mostly tend to be “filler track” rather than “Helloween playing ska or nu metal”. The house did not win. Not this time.
