A miserable listen. One of the most violently wrong-sounding albums I own. It captures a band ready to break up, and its silly melodies and forced-happy tone gives it a tragicomic “fiddling on the Titanic” tone. The singer was fired three months after its release, and a year after that the drummer jumped in front of a train.
It’s the only Helloween album that gives me no way in, the only one where the question “what were they trying for here?” has no clear answer. The title and cover suggests a band making a statement for artistic diversity: for breaking out of the power metal ghetto, for doing the unexpected. But “weird” is an adjective, not a noun. An approach, not an identity. You can’t have a band founded on sonic diversity and nothing else: that simply means you don’t have a sound. The cover sums things up—it’s colors for the sake of colors, not actually a painting of anything.
In practice, Chameleon is a three-way solo album between singer Michael Kiske and guitarists Michael Weikath and Roland Grapow, who are now apparently communicating through lawyers who end every correspondence with “conduct yourself accordingly”. The hostility in this hate triangle is palpable, and bleeds through on the record. None of them like or respect what the other two are doing, and at times they almost seem to be sabotaging each other. Also present are the ever-reliable bassist Markus Grosskopf, who does what he can, and drummer Ingo Swichtenberg, whose paranoid schizophrenia was sadly worsening, and who clearly hates the Beatles- and Queen-influenced songs more than anyone.
It’s horribly overproduced, and an example of how money can’t make bad music good. Songs like “In the Night” are overwrought and overthought, packed with vocal and guitar and saxophone (?) overdubs to disguise how weak they are. Synthesizers prove a particularly hateful presence: even good songs like “Giants” and “I Believe” have cheesy bleep-bloopy one-finger Fairlight arpeggios on them, of the sort you normally hear on Huey Lewis songs. Abominable. If you’re ripping off Queen, couldn’t you also rip off the “No Synthesizers” sleeve notes?
Michael Weikath’s songs have the largest quality delta. “First Time” is an okay hair metal song that passes without much pain. “Giants” is actually a minor classic, and would have fit well on either Keeper album. It has a heavy as hell NWOBHM-influenced main riff, and the chorus is sublime. “Don’t you, won’t you, say that we’ll be free again!” On the other hand, “Revolution Now” is a droning 70s Jimi Hendrix knockoff that’s eight minutes long. It sounds like Oasis’s Be Here Now, and is equally boring. “Windmill” (or “Shitmill”, in Ingo’s memorable term) is the worst ballad ever written by the band: rank, rancid, and insipid.
Roland Grapow’s songs are largely dull. “Crazy Cat” has some big band flash but no good hooks. You’d have to pay me to listen to “I Don’t Wanna Cry No More” again. “Music” has a Pink Floyd-inspired bridge with some fine single-coil Strat guitar soloing, but otherwise is as unmemorable as its title implies. “Step Out of Hell” is filler burdened with yet more synth cheese.
Michael Kiske was never the band’s greatest songwriter. Here, he offers a surprise in “I Believe”, an emotionally bludgeoning but effective ode to faith that’s nearly a masterpiece. It has some wonderful ideas in the Iron Maiden/Manilla Road vein (ironically, he’d soon swear off heavy metal entirely), but it’s just too long and draggy. It needed some tempo changes in the middle. Still, I think this might be the album’s finest track. “When the Sinner” is overlong and mediocre at best, and is overloaded with questionable ideas (if you’re one of the millions of fans who thought “Helloween would sound much better with alto sax solos”, then I’ve got the album for you.) The Paul McCartney-esque “In the Night” is just too sonically confused to stay in the memory.
Not only did Helloween tear to shreds what made them successful, they replaced it with…nothing. Just shallow, derivative imitations of other bands and styles. Chameleon has two good songs and ten bad ones, with saxophones and synthesizers. At times it seems like a practical joke. At least they released it in 1993, when the world’s appetite for retro-progressive dad rock was at an all time low. The album’s title feels appropriate: it was literally invisible.
What does the title mean? That, I can’t tell you. It’s an excellent power metal album, however. Time of the Oath was 25% better than Master of the Rings; Better than Raw is 25% greater again. Everything locks into place here. Music, tone, style, production, performance. It’s distinct from anything Helloween made before, yet feels like a summation and endpoint of their 90s style: great songs, performed with panache and energy. Helloween wasn’t just out of “comeback hell” in 1998, they producing melodic power metal that compared decently against their classic 80s run (Walls of Jericho plus Keeper of the Seven Keys I and II).
All of the musicians more than pull their weight, but one of them steals the show. Uli Kusch’s drumming is so damned good here—flashy and technical, yet in-the-pocket and lively. Listen to the way he anchors the start of “Push”—tight triplets on the kicks, with sharp, precise hats punching Markus Grosskopf’s bubbling bass into place like steel tentpegs—or the unyielding chaos of “Midnight Sun”—where flurries of wild snare and tom fills swoop and overtake each other like crazed birds. He adds such interesting skeletons to fairly average midpaced fair like “Hey Lord!” that they seem absolutely compelling.
This might be the most balanced Helloween album from a songwriting perspective. Four songs by Uli, four by Weikath, four by Deris. This is the only 90s Helloween album to have absolutely no songs credited to lead guitarist Roland Grapow, but I happen to know he “ghosted” a fair bit on Uli’s songs. The staccato guitar riff in “Revelation” was written by him, for example.
“Push” is fast. “Falling Higher” is even faster. Tommy Hansen’s production is dated, archaic and rough, with bits of dust seeming to cling to the cracks in every note. I think this was the last time they ever worked with Hansen, and represents another breaking point with their classic power metal style. Subsequent albums had a more modern (sometimes too modern) sound.
There are some recondite progressive rock touches in the album’s second half, which, unlike Chameleon, are well done and don’t seem too distinct from the band’s core style. “Time” and “A Handful of Pain”.
The worst song is probably Weikath’s “Lavdate Dominum”, which listens like a goofy punk rock song, or a heavy metal cover of some Christmas carol. I don’t know what the idea was here. He also gets the album closer, “Midnight Sun”, which is really good; extremely lengthy and technical while also fraught with emotional agitation. One of Deris’s great vocal tracks is on this song.
There are two great songs, that are pretty much in the top 10 greatest Helloween tracks every time I make a list. The first is Uli Kusch’s “Revelation”, an amazing, warp-speed epic that seems to be a jaded postmodern take on the Bible. Astonishing shifts in feel and tempo, solo after solo, weird digressions into funk rock and thrash, the album’s greatest chorus…Worlds form, collide, and break apart inside this song.
The second is a complete surprise. “I Can” is one of the hardest sellouts Helloween ever sold, literally being an alternative rock song that sounds like New Order’s Get Ready more than anything, But it’s extremely well-written, compact, and catchy. I’m glad they didn’t go further into the territory explored here, but man, I’m glad they planted a flag at least this far.
1998-2000 was the era where power metal became incredibly competitive: bands like Gamma Ray and Stratovarius were in the middle of career-defining hot streaks, newcomers like Freedom Call even America was finally becoming relevant again thanks to Virgin Steele and Kamelot. Better than Raw ranks alongside the best of that period.
Running Wild fans disagree on when the band went bad. Some say the classic period ended with 2000’s Victory, when drummer Jörg Michael left and was replaced in the studio by “Angelo Sasso”, a man who has never played live, has never been seen or photographed, and who sounds remarkably like a drum machine. Others draw the line at 2002’s The Brotherhood, when longtime guitarist Thilo Hermann quit and the band became a Rolf Kasparek solo project. Others cite 2005’s Rogues en Vogue, which has music just as good as its title (unfortunately). Still others point to 2000’s Oops I Did It Again as the turning point when the band fell apart, which is strange because that’s a Britney Spears album. I’m still not sure about their whole deal.
Me? In my house, we support Victory. Despite its fake drums and Rolf’s strange notions about songwriting, it’s still a powerful work, hewing to the band’s strengths (those tremolo-picked pentatonic melodies that define the Teutonic sound), and “The Hussar”, “Tsar”, and “Victory” are some of the best songs the band recorded in the 90s. Don’t be fooled by the Beatles cover. Victory is power metal of nearly the first rank.
The Brotherhood is the album people accuse Victory of being: it’s seldom better than tolerable, and is often actually bad: either uninspired or inspired in wrong directions (obnoxious butt rock and ripoffs of KISS and AC/DC). It doesn’t just capture the band in sharp decline, it captures a new, weird version of Running Wild that’s barely a band at all: Rolf wrote all the songs, played all the guitar parts, programmed the drums, self-produced the album, etc, and the big problem with McCartney II-style bedroom records manifests itself, there’s nobody to rein in his worst impulses as a songwriter.
Rolf always had a love of KISS-style arena rock, but he knew on some level that most Running Wild fans do not share that love, so he kept it down to a dull roar. One or two songs like “Kiss of Death” and “Fight the Fires of Hate” exist per album, but no more. But suddenly, the album is packed with goofy shoutalong “stadium” moments, crowding out the speed and melody.
It’s a terrible idea. Even if you like KISS, Rolf is no Paul Stanley vocally, and the drum mach—I mean, Angelo Sasso gives the performance a sterile, enervated tone. Stadium rock is all about involving the audience in a collective human experience bigger than the sum of its parts. You can’t do that when your drums sound Kraftwerk-mechanical. Rolf is attempting to evolve the band’s sound in a direction that neither his skillset nor budget will allow.
After “Welcome to Hell” (the most boring fast song Rolf ever wrote—it goes through you like water), we get “Soulstrippers”, where the album rolls up its sleeves and starts doing what it really wants to do: lame power chords, a tempo set at a midpaced choogle, and a general brainless vibe of “ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?” that clashes with the socially conscious lyrics about media partisanship. But honestly, I’m glad someone finally solved that issue using the most powerful force known to man: boomer rock.
(Update: further research suggests “Soulstrippers” by Running Wild did not actually solve media partisanship. We regret the mistake.)
“Crossfire” is the same song again, even the stop-start pattern to the (very generic) “riff”. “Detonator”…look, this is a family website. I won’t assault your ears with offensive racial slurs like “d*d r*ck”. Let’s just say that if this song was a person, it would be a man, about 40 to 50 years old and recently divorced, with a widening paunch, a receding hairline, a pool room equipped with a wet bar, a collection of bespoke fishing lures, and an ability to flawlessly do a Johnny Carson golf swing on command. That’s how dad this song is. It’s like a bad parody of an AC/DC track. Just horrible to hear.
“Unation” always reads like “Urination” to me, which would make more sense than the real title. What does “Unation” mean? An “un”-nation? A “nation” made of “U”? I don’t want to be part of Rolf’s nation: he’s a pirate, and I don’t think my civic rights will be well-respected. The song itself is not bad: a kind of overlong torch anthem that makes you GET YOUR FISTS IN THE AIR and then hold them up for nearly six minutes straight. Life is tough in the republic of Unation.
“Dr Horror” is yet another dad rock opus with weak riffs and barely any metal influences at all. In the second verse, Rolf shouts “SEX!!!” for seemingly no reason. Also, what does he mean by “Tittytainments overload”? Actually, don’t tell me. Clearly, there were things going on in Helmut Kohl’s Germany that history is better off forgetting.
Closing epic “The Ghost” is based on Lawrence of Arabia. It invites direct forensic comparison to past epics like “Treasure Island”, and you hear that the songwriting just isn’t there anymore. The song is a chore to get through: it shows Rolf busting out the double harmonic major scale for an ersatz-Oriental feel, but even that’s a stale and unengaging cliche. At least it’s metal.
However, there are a few decent tracks.
“Siberian Winter” is an instrumental (a rarity for latter-day Running Wild) that’s quite fast. After “Crossfire” and “Soulstrippers”, hearing double-bass drumming again made me want to cry with relief: I felt how the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front must have felt when they found a soldier’s fallen-off leg to eat.
“Pirate Song” is the band swinging at the safest target imaginable: an uptempo power metal song about pirates. It’s good, which is no surprise. This is the equivalent of Georgia O’Keefe painting her own labia flaps: the band’s in its artistic safe zone here.
“The Brotherhood” is a long-winded but compelling mini-epic that harkens back to The Rivalry. It’s slow, heavy, methodical, and works perfectly. The title track on Running Wild albums is invariably great, a streak which would dramatically break with 2005’s Rogues en Vogue, where none of the songs are good.
Overall, the album is dregs and distillates. The highlights are just faded Xeroxes of past glories. The lowlights are the worst influences possible. Rolf is clearly losing interest in the Running Wild sound, and although he can go through the motions, The Brotherhood just isn’t that. Like trying to get drunk off a bottle that was emptied days ago.
