Running Wild is known as “that band with pirate-themed lyrics”, but that’s the least interesting thing about them. One of the early German power metal bands, they’re a striking case of musical taxidermy. They got their sound figured out in 1986, or dunked it in a tank of preservatives, and thirty years later they’re still playing it. No new ideas allowed!

No other band has hewn to a sound this hard or this long. Helloween went through a Beatles period. Accept went through a hair metal period. Rage has played every single metal genre under the sun. But Running Wild now has a streak of thirteen albums that, on a sonic level, all pretty much sound the same. When Otto the school bus driver complains about bands ripping off Priest, this is the one he’s talking about.

Sadly, the quality level started dropping around 1995 or so. You can only photocopy your ass cheeks so many times before the printouts get all faded and weak, and that seems to be happening to Running Wild. Depending on who you ask, 2000’s Victory is either “the last vaguely good album” or “the first legitimately bad one.”

Myself, I like it. It lacks the epic, exploratory quality of their early 90s work, but it’s has a disciplined, martial aesthetic. The songs are short, punchy, and to the point, like parade drills. Part of it is songwriting. Part of it is the ultra-mechanical production, bolstered by a drum machine (Rolf Kasparek had the chutzpah to claim that the drumming was a friend who didn’t want to be credited).

Obviously there’s enough filler for a Tempurpedic mattress. I don’t know if I needed a Beatles cover. “The Fall of Dorkas”, “Silent Killer”, “Into the Fire”…boring, boring, boring. Running Wild has a unique talent for writing songs that induce narcolepsy without actually coming off as bad, and that side of the band is on full display here.

But I don’t care, because there’s enough highlights to wake you back up again. “When Time Runs Out” has an evocative main lead melody that reminds me of “Rock Hard, Ride Free”. “Return of the Gods” could be titled “Return of the Goods”.

The album’s two greatest cuts are “Hussar”, taking us from the Spanish main to a couple hundred miles inland, and “Victory”, where Rolf Kasparek displays his penchant for snaking, pentatonic alt-picking. Running Wild has an interesting conflict at its heart: they are generic as they come and unapologetic 80s revivalists, but they have a singular sound that’s entirely their own – nobody writes riffs like Running Wild, unless they’re trying to sound like Running Wild (and usually not even then.)

Don’t let a Beatles cover and a nonexistent drummer put you off. This is unequivocally one for the “good RW” table, and it’s not seated at the foot, either.

This album has metal’s most misleading title since “Fast” by Dopethrone, “Plenty of Mids” by Pantera, and “Not Boring” by Opeth. This is very conservative German power metal that can mostly be predicted in advance.

The BPM is stuck between 120bpm in a generic uptempo stomp. There are screechy, trying-too-hard-to-be-Halford vocals, and guitars chugging away on the 8th note.

Plus, there are liberal occurrences of the Generic Primal Fear chorus. What’s the Generic Primal Fear chorus, you ask? SONG TITLE! / JABBER JABBER JABBER! / SONG TITLE! / JABBER JABBER SCREEEAAAAAAAAM! They have literally forty or fifty songs with this exact chorus.

…Are you excited by this? I’m not. How many homages to Judas Priest do we fucking need?. In the transhumanist community they talk about “rogue superintelligences” – basically, superintelligent computers with interests that are not aligned with humanity’s. A commonly given example is a computer that wants to fill the universe with paperclips. Primal Fear is exactly like a rogue AI that wants to fill the universe with “Breaking the Law”.

In the past I’ve stuck it out through Primal Fear’s crappy songs (and they have an ENDLESS SUPPLY of them) to get to the occasional barn-burner like “Give Em Hell” and “Nuclear Fire”. This time, I approached track 7 in a state of near-narcolepsy with a realisation – here was a new beast, a Primal Fear album with no redeeming tracks!

I was half right. The album has a bonus track called “Final Call”, which is fast and thrashy, and has some neat sectional contrasts. Why it isn’t on the album is a mystery. I guess they threw it off for another song where Ralf Scheepers shouts the title like a mongoloid. “Your holy scripture – your bible verse / They cause all conflict and make things worse”. Great lyrics. I just threw up in my stomach.

I don’t get it. Why do you people like Primal Fear? They make album after album of mechanical and boring metal that disappears from my memory roughly 2.1 seconds after listening to it. Iron Savior has great production. Gamma Ray has Kai Hansen’s songwriting. Helloween has some vestiges of nostalgia value. These guys have nothing.

Remember how we always mourn that Judas Priest never made another Painkiller? Be careful what you wish for, I say. Imagine Judas Priest in their current state of decreptitude, still trying to rewrite Painkiller with every album.

They’d be making…Primal Fear albums.

The second of the classic-era Helloween albums, Keeper part Deus is a fifty minute fanfare of melodic power metal that leaves no tooth unrotted. Until Helloween, power metal’s approach was “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Afterwards, it was “a spoonful of sugar helps the sugar go down”.

It’s a little less earnest in its sweetness than Keeper 1, and a little more self-parodic. You can see vague reflections of the internet conflict that would eventually break up the band. Imagine the creepy forced-happy vibe of “Future World” spread over an entire album. At times, Keeper 2 sounds like fiddlers playing as the ship sinks.

It’s not as good as the first one, mostly because Michael Weikath has stepped into the role of primary songwriter here – the album’s absolutely infested with his tracks, and other than the opener “Eagle Fly Free” he doesn’t do anything truly great here. “Dr Stein” and “Rise and Fall” are midpaced, and quickly let the excitement ebb away. The closing epic just doesn’t have enough songwriting-fu to stay interesting for 13 minutes.

Michael Kiske’s contributions are likewise forgettable: he has a spectacular voice, and not much else. It was once joked that Jayne Mansfield’s acting abilities consisted of filling out a sweater. In Kiske’s case, his one redeeming attribute is located a few inches further up on his sternum.

But suddenly, the goods get develivered. Kai Hansen’s lonely three songs run back to back to back in the album’s middle, and they’re arguably the best three song run in Helloween’s history.

“Save Us” is fast and savage, upping the ante on “Twilight of the Gods.” “March of Time” is another golden Helloween standard that delivers everything you could want from this band. “I Want Out” is genius that years of overplay only slightly diminishes, featuring a jagged dual-guitar melody and lots of great vocal acrobatics. The lyrics pretty much state Kai’s frame of mind at the time. It’s good that he only wanted out from Helloween, not out from power metal.

Pablo Picasso years trying desperately to do something new, something unique. He moved from style to style, mastering and then rejecting methods…and then he paid a visit to the newly discovered Lascaux cave paintings. As the story goes, seeing these 16,000 year old works of art almost broke him. “We have invented nothing!”

Helloween’s Keeper albums might provoke a similar reaction to fans of modern Nuclear Blast-style metal. Other than the thunderous orchestras (which Helloween couldn’t afford in the era before software symphonies), there’s really nothing around today that wasn’t either invented or perfected here. Bits and pieces of power metal have always existed, from Iommi’s overdubbed guitar tracks to “Highway Star’s” duelling solos to Meat Loaf’s shamelessness. Helloween took those elements and made a style out of it. It’s naive, inconsistent, and sometimes irritating. It’s also the bedrock of a good amount of what’s considered cool today.

Which is ironic, because this album is weapon-grade uncool.