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.
You’d better like 1977’s rock opus Bat Out of Hell. You were conceived to it. I am not speaking hypothetically. You were actually conceived while it was playing. I know this as a fact. I was there. I was watching.
“Are we doing an ‘I fucked your mom thing’ here?” Sadly, no. I did not participate in your conception. I was wearing my Roscoe the Rat costume at the time, and Mr Jenkins (my shift manager) would yell at me if I even unbuttoned the bum flap without notarized consent, so I was forced to remain an observer. I remember finding it odd that two people were screwing in the drive-thru of Roscoe the Rat’s Squeak-tastic Burger Barn, but was glad to finally see the miracle of life occur. Anyway.
This album had a lot working against it. An album of eight minute Wagnerian piano ballads, starring a chubby farmboy from Texas, released in the face of two adversarial headwinds—disco in the US, punk in the UK—yeah, good luck with that. To a risk-averse music industry, this album must have seemed like a scientific experiment in how to sell zero copies. It eventually sold forty-four million. Which is nearly the same as zero, when you think about it (I didn’t).
But songwriter Jim Steinman believed in being out of step with the times, believed in being unfashionable on purpose. It usually doesn’t work, but sometimes it’s the only thing that can. It’s never easy, though. Meat Loaf and Steinman had to tour the record relentlessly, finally breaking the beast in Canada (where it’s currently 2x Platinum). Canadians are right to love Meat Loaf, just as they’re right to love Fleetwood Mac (Rumors is also 2x Platinum). Let’s do Canadians a favor and stop examining their cultural tastes while they’re ahead.
But success came at a price. Meat Loaf’s brutal road schedule did not allow off-days so his voice could recover, which meant it it didn’t. Meat Loaf tore his amazing voice to shreds performing these songs live, five days a week. His next album (1981’s Dead Ringer) finds him a haggard shell of his former self. It’s a dispiriting listen. He died so that Bat Out of Hell could live. There are several Michael Lee Aday albums. But in a sense, this is the one and only record ever made by Meat Loaf. Bat Out of Hell is glorious: a work I truly love. But it’s tragic, as well as magic.
(The above is Steinman’s own account of what went wrong with Meat Loaf’s voice. A perusal of Setlist.fm suggests a far more relaxed schedule than he lets on, with countless multi-day breaks between shows. But maybe there are dates missing, so take that for what it’s worth. Which is also how you should take Meat Loaf’s own claim that his voice loss was mainly “psychosomatic”.)
And the album’s very magic. Enchantment leaps off the speakers, out of the cover, and out of nearly every other element of its conception. Few albums are so uniformly great in every aspect. It has wonderful singing, great production and engineering, and beyond superlative songwriting.
Two of the three greatest compositions Jim Steinman ever wrote in his life are on here (the third being “Faster than the Speed of Night” by Bonnie Tyler).
The first highlight is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, a great and hammy piece of Springsteen-style storytelling, packed with cool moments and inspired ideas. And it’s funny, too—overflowing with tonal influences from Steinman and Ellen Foley’s work with National Lampoon. My only complaint is that the “will you love me?” part goes for a long time, and finally exhausts the listener the way it exhausts the protagonist. (Apparently Steinman’s original version was twenty minutes long, and had him doing the Phil Rizzuto baseball bit himself.)
But the masterpiece—of the album, and of several of the creators’ careers—is closing opus “For Crying Out Loud”. A lesson in how to take an unsuspecting piano and pound it until the stars fall. The middle section breaks, strings crash, and then total cataclysm occurs. Atoms split, everything’s louder than everything else. It’s an astonishing album closer. An off-ramp that sends you flying into space.
Everything else here is great too. The opening track is a powerful scorching barn-burner, grasping and ambitious and realizing those ambitions. “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” finds Steinman in standard power balladeer mode—a cloak he obviously wears quite well. Even the shorter album tracks rule all over the place. “All Revved Up And No Place To Go” is more great Springsteen-type stuff. I love the double-time groove at the end. It sounds so fiery and kickass and cool.
Most of the album is very dramatic. Perhaps excessively so, to some tastes. I guess maybe it verges slightly on the wrong side of theater-kid precious, but I don’t really mind it. And there are plenty of moments where it’s absolutely not taking itself seriously, to offset the sturm-und-drang. Todd Rundgren offers quite a lot of ironic detachment—the opening riff in “Paradise” sounds like a mega-cliche’d blues riff that you’d play when you’re taking the piss. There’s an element of persiflage to what Bat Out of Hell is doing. Of trying to make the audience smile while not totally undermining the project. It does the hardest thing: satirizes itself while also taking itself seriously. No matter what level you approach this CD on, it meets you there.
None of the other Meat Loaf albums equal this.
His big comeback, Bat out of Hell 2 does offer strangely exact parallels in a lot of ways. (And not just because it had a song that, like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”, your buddy from school would swear up and down was secretly about anal sex, harr harr.) Again, Meat Loaf released it in the worst of possible years—by 1993, grunge rock had just broken in the states, and R’n’B had a commercial stranglehold that I viscerally remember. And suddenly, you had this disc of massive operatic cheeseburgers that sold a million million copies. Another inspiring win for the little guy. Or the big guy, I guess.
But sometimes the parallels go awry. The singing is not as strong. And where Todd Rundgren’s production of Bat out of Hell is timeless, Bat Out of Hell 2‘s production now feels (while not bad) fairly typical of its era. It’s essentially 1993, The Album, with that “early-gen CD sound”—a bit harsh, a bit too informed by the ultra-processed sound of glam metal. There are some modernistic touches that don’t quite gel with the Broadway-meets-Peter Pan grandeur being attempted.
Bat Out of Hell 3 is not something I care to discuss at length. I mean, Wikipedia says that “[Desmond] Child [who produced] began recording sessions by playing Slipknot CDs to get the assembled musicians in the mood.” That’s a better summation of the album’s issues than I could ever write.
It contains a grab bag of mostly old (and mostly second-tier) Jim Steinman compositions (who was sadly in fading health at the time), fluffed out with whatever Songwriters’R’Us guys Meat Loaf could find (Rob Zombie’s John 5, Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx). It’s long, exhausting, tonally confused, and unnecessary. It does not earn its name. To its credit, few albums do. The first Bat out of Hell extends out of rock entirely, and is arguably bigger than music itself.
Like all of Jim Steinman’s work, Bat Out of Hell owes no allegiance to any form of media. It’s a rock album, but even that ultimately seems almost accidental. It could have just as easily been a play (it started out that way), or a film, or a book, or a tube of wart-removal cream. The fact that Bat out of Hell is the particular thing it is seems like a twist of fate. Steinman’s patented technique of making things bigger than big and more colorful than color works on any canvas. Maybe not the wart-removal cream canvas. He’s compared to Springsteen more than enough (in this review, too), but there’s a bit of Bowie in him. Bowie was essentially a light entertainer who used rock—like a latter day French chanson singer. I like that. Use art in whatever way you can. Don’t be its slave.
An album where I fear to tread. Where I chop and change on whether it’s good or not.
I will say this: it feels like an accomplishment that I enjoy Helloween’s 2005 two-CD opus as much as I do, because the band seemingly did not want me to. It puts many barriers between the music and the listener. Such as the first thing you notice about it: its title.
Yes, this is Helloween’s *Bat out of Hell 3*. Helloween’s *Operation Mindcrime 2.* One of *those* albums. The band, a solid 18 years removed from their classic *Keeper* golden years (and missing three out of the five musicians that made those years possible), is trying to *title* their way to a comeback. Ew. Gross.
They swing hard at the idea, sparing no expense. On a technical level, this is the best Helloween album ever made. Witness the greatest production work of Charlie Bauerfeind’s career—everything loud and punchy and precise, treble stropped sharp, bass pelagic-deep, no trace of mud or fizz anywhere. There’s an attentiveness to sonic equality—to getting all the players and registers on the same page—that’s very unusual, but effectively realized. Even Grosskopf’s basslines bounce out at you so clearly that a sharp-eared bassist could probably tab out all thirteen tracks on their second listen. The album’s sonics are rich and lush and verge on overvoluptuous, but it thrills with its decadence. It feels like all the instruments had breast implants and buccal fat removal surgery, if that makes sense.
And the musicians themselves are on fire (not literally—as *Mythbusters* confirmed, power metal musicians are non-flammable). The first stable lineup Helloween had in years (Deris/Weikath/Gerstner/Grosskopf/Loble) simply clicks in a way *Rabbit Don’t Come Easy*‘s transitional roster couldn’t—in particular, new drummer Dani Loble proves to be an astonishing discovery, finding little grooves and fills everywhere in the music and pounding them into your skull. After Uli Kusch, he’s my second favorite drummer to ever play in this band (with apologies to Ingo, who was fast and aggressive for 1985 but a little simplistic by modern standards).
The album sounds like a million deutschmarks. No complaints there.
But…it’s simply not as good as *Keeper of the Seven Keys* part *I* and *II*. Yes, that’s true of most albums, and I don’t normally draw the comparison. But when you call your album *Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Legacy*, you’re shoving the barrel of that particular shotgun into your mouth and making duck noises.
Why do it? Why attempt the impossible—releasing a third (technically third and fourth, considering the 2nd disk) *Keeper* album, after nearly two decades? The 80s Helloween albums are truly special. And they relied on the soaring vocals of Michael Kiske and the brilliant songwriting of Kai Hansen, neither of whom are in the room. The energy roused by a bunch of eighteen year olds from Hamburg cannot be summoned at will by forty year old men, only two of whom were in the band when it was active.
Worse, the songs are alarmingly spotty. Weak, knock-kneed, and confused. We get Michael Weikath’s foray into KISS style cock-rock with “Get it Up”, Andi Deris’s emptyheaded rewrite of “Dr Stein” entitled “Mrs God”, and uninteresting album filler like Weikath’s “Do You Know What You Are Fighting For” and Gerstner’s “The Invisible Man” that I have to actively fight not to skip over.
And don’t get me started on the “epic” that begins each disc. Both are so bloated you could swing a battleaxe through their skinniest part and not hit bone.
In general, the album is strongest as a glittery modern Nuclear Blast style power metal album, similar to the Finnish bands popular at the time (Sonata Arctica, Celesty, Dreamtale, and such). It is weakest when viewed as a continuation of classic Helloween. It is the latter comparison that the band forces you to make, over and over. Honestly, I dislike the whole idea of ever returning to Keeper. It’s not like this is some fascinating, rich fantasy concept. The whole thing’s at worst (or best?) meaningless, and at best (or worst?) a Stryper-lite fantasy parable about Christianity, as written by teenaged German boys who knew many words, and even a couple that were in English.
There are some bits and pieces of classic Helloween, but it’s done in a careless mocking way that smacks of persiflage. Sascha Gerstner’s “Silent Rain” has a chorus melody nearly identical to “Eagle Fly Free”, but the lyrics are about child molestation. Why do that? This is meant as a joke? “You know what sucks about ‘Eagle Fly Free’? No child molestation” is a thought I cannot imagine anyone ever having.
The songs hit double-digit numbers of minutes (for the first time since 1988), but don’t do much good with it. “King of a Thousand Years” is boring. “Occasion Avenue” opens with a recap of classic Helloween songs, cementing the feeling that Helloween is trying to bully their way unearned into classic stature (“Forget that stuff, here’s the real deal!”). And although the song has a catchy chorus and some interesting parts, it doesn’t earn its length. The goal seems to have been to write a very, very long song, like classic Helloween, filling the empty space with whatever will fill it.
Andi Deris is an overwhelming presence, writing easily 80% of the material. He gives us album highlights “Come Alive”, and “The Shade in the Shadow”—poppy modern power metal songs that don’t sound like anything on either real *Keeper* LP but are of high quality—and “Occasion Avenue” is worth venturing down, through you could skip over about 6 minutes in the middle. He’s also behind “Mrs God”, and the lifeless ballad “Light the Universe”. Michael Weikath is the most active point of contact with 80s Helloween (Grosskopf was also in the band then, but he didn’t write songs until the 90s), but he contributes a generic fast song “Born on Judgment Day” that could have been written by anyone. His other two songs (“Do You Know What You Are Fighting For” and “Get It Up”) are the worst things the album has to offer.
*Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Legacy* direly wants to be more than it is. It’s trying to bully its way into classic status, in a way that’s undignified. Like trying to offer St Peter a blowjob to get into heaven. Does that work? Has anyone tried it? The Bible says the sheep will be separated from the goats. Does that include throat goats?
Imagine if David Gilmour reformed “Pink Floyd” with a mixture of new musicians and AI and released *The Even Darker Side of the Moon*. Would you take it seriously? Of course not. It would be ludicrous. But it would probably sell copies, wouldn’t it?
*Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Beggacy* has been tried before, and will be tried again, over and over, long after modern life has Fedex-mailed us all into our coffins. Sometimes these sorts of forced comebacks happen at a label’s behest, but other times it’s the band themselves, because they sense something dark in the world’s elaborately turning gears. They sense that they do not matter. That music does not matter. What matters is the *brand*. The brand is the valuable thing that must be fought for. That’s why we get farcical situations—multiple competing versions of RATT and Queensryche and LA Guns roaming the land, suing each other for copyright infringement. You know why they call them brands? Because they used to put them on cattle.
Long ago, on *Keeper of the Seven Keys I* Kai Hansen wrote “Future World”. It opened with a fussy but charming little pentatonic melody, notes staccato palm-muted. It sounded like a man trying to pick a lock. “We all live in happiness! / our life is full of joy! / We say the word “tomorrow” without fear!” Yeah, there was irony to it—it’s like a recruitment anthem for a cult—but I always responded to the song’s reaching, defiant optimism.
In 2005, that optimism seemed so far away. Very hard to summon (or even remember). We’d seen the truth staring like a skull: there is no Future World. There isn’t even a Present World. There’s only a Past World, to be returned to again and again, a well brimming with nostalgic memories in a dry and arid desert. The past is our one source of meaning. There can never be anything new. Just pastiches of the old. Just *Keeper of the Seven Keys Part 3* and *The Simpsons season 34* and skeletonized boomers strumming guitars and bringing back ghosts, even though they seem halfway there themselves. Maybe when you sleep in the desert of Now, you dream of wide and blue oceans, echoing the face of the sky into the deep horizon. But it’s not real. Just stick to the well—even though less and less water comes up with every pull, even though it’s dark with pollution, it’s what we have and it’s all we have. Don’t leave the well. There’s nowhere else.
