In 2006, Chris and his virtual band of hedgehogs set the world on fire. Now, they’re ready to do it all again – and no troll, no jerk, no pair of DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS will get in their way.

While the first album had Chris singing karaoke-style over Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys songs, Chris’s tastes have broadened (like his physique) and now includes artists like Madonna, Meatloaf, and Bruce Springsteen. “Trollsta’s Paradise”, is sung over “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio, and is a blistering attack on the trolls and 4channers who have made his life a misery. Chris might hate black people, but that doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate gangsta rap, just as hating gay people has never stopped him from putting objects up his ass on occasion. You have to be open-minded about some things.

The next song is a remake of “Like a Virgin”, a topic Chris can speak on with some authority. Chris’s dulcet tones are hard to hear on this one, Madonna’s voice is about twice as loud as his mic volume. There’s one song that has Chris singing without any musical accompaniment – a creepy cover of Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” where he sounds like Herbert from Family Guy. Doesn’t Herbert have a crush on a character called Chris? There you go, then.

This album comes from the period when he was dating a girl troll called Ivy, and his new amorata finds her way into many of the modified lyrics. “I’m Sexy For My Ivy” is sung over Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback”, which was a hit song merely three years prior to this “album” being made – remarkably early to the party by Chris’s standards. He has some trouble remembering his own lyrics and staying on the beat. I blame young love.

Ivy apparently owns a pair of hermit crabs called Crass and Champ, and Chris really took a liking to them. Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” gets redone into a song about the crabs making love at the beach. I don’t know if Ivy ever got around to telling Chris that Crass and Champ are both male.

The album is curious in that it could be interpreted as Chris finally starting to grow up. Hardly any of the songs are about videogames or pokemon or Sonichu. The only time Chris’s fictional characters get to strut their stuff is in the final song, “Punchy and Layla’s Dance In The Dark,” where they do a lot more than strutting. The final lyrics are “I’ll throw my best punches!
Hwah! Hwah!” Can someone get Layla to a battered woman’s shelter?

Surely no recommendation is needed, but suffice to say that the Hedgehog Boys have done it again. Get this album now, and please don’t put it up your ass.

I am heavily OD’d on this album, but my impression is of an album that is good bordering on excellent. It’s not THE power metal album, but it’s a good release worthy of bearing the Masterplan name.

The Masterplan name, by the way, was suggested by a Brazilian fan in 2002 who was delighted that so many master musicians were planning together. They were a nearly a definitive heavy metal supergroup, made up of cast-offs from Helloween, Iron Savior, and Ark. Roland Grapow’s modern and progressive riffing style plus Uli Kusch’s dizzying technical drumbeats plus Jorn Lande’s continent-filling vocals equaled very, very good music.

Unfortunately, problems started setting in after their second album: slackening record sales, a feud between Uli and Roland, and worst of all, a singer who just didn’t care that much. Since then the band has been like a drowning man being pulled downstream and clutching at eddying pieces of driftwood. New singers, new drummers, new styles. After the dry, Scorpions-inspired Time to Be King, Novum Initium finds the band playing power metal, this time with Rick Altzi on vocals and an incredibly powerful new drummer called Martin Skaroupka. If Kusch was Les Binks then Skaroupka is Scott Travis – relentless double-bass flurries and lightning fast snare fills, amplified by a production job so dense and heavy that Novum Initium borders on sounding ridiculous.

There’s still a bit more midtempo material than is really needed, but Novum Initium regains the ground lost by Time to be King, and introduces some interest progressive elements.

“The Game” is ferociously fast, with many different sections. “Black Night of Magic” is a bit like “Kind Hearted Light” on the debut, except with the riffs stealing market share from the keyboards instead of the other way around. “Pray on My Soul” is an adequate midtempo unit-shifter. The ballad “Through Your Eyes” is musically well done, although the production is too heavy and compressed to work for this sort of song. It’s like the band is performing open heart surgery with a sledgehammer.

“Betrayal” features prominent sitar sections and an agitated chorus, but the best song is “Return to Avalon”, a simple tribute to Helloween that does not do a single thing wrong. It’s catchy enough to be memorised after your first listen, but it has enough contrapuntal intrigue and complexity for that not to be your last listen. The chord changes backing the final repetition of the chorus are brilliant.

The final song is the 10:17 title track. I had high expectations, and they were kind of met. It’s an impressive musical achievement, with Roland bashing out lots of low-end riffs and keyboardist Axel Mackenrott laying down atmosphere like a bastard. But it lacks the flying speed and majesty of “Black in the Burn” and feels like too little bread spread over too much butter (or whatever hobbits say). Still, that final chorus is a thing of beauty. I think it would have been better if they’d shaved two or three minutes off – I’m not picky where.

Masterplan is not down and they’re not out. They don’t match their first three albums, and they probably never will, again, but they’re still a massive threat. If nothing else, it beats the latest Helloween album, and that’s kind of the whole reason this band exists.

I haven’t listened to his album. For one thing, I don’t believe I’d like it. Second, it costs money. Ridiculous. Apparently, in the year 2013, they seriously expect fifteen to twenty dollars for this album. I tried to walk out of the music store with CDs stuffed in my pockets, but they called security. Sometimes I swear this whole “compact disc” format is just a racket to make money.

However, I’ve listened to a few songs from it, and I have some suggestions as to how modern music could be made better.

1. It is not necessary to have a black guy standing around going “ayuh” or “yeah” every few seconds.

2. Please keep the number of “guest stars” to a small number. I’m tired of song titles like “In Da Club ft IBleedCrystal w/ MC NeverLearnedtoRead & DJ IrresponsibleLifestyle.” Adopt George Bezos’s 2-pizzas rule. Could the album’s guest support be fed with just two pizzas? Actually, forget that. Most of the people on this album probably practice bulimia, and thus any number of guest stars could be fed with two pizzas.

3. Putting a hashtag in a song title should be punished by being bastinado’d. It would be a simple: hashtags in your songs equals bruises on your feet. That would solve the problem.

4. Jumping on a flavour-of-the-moment fad will only date your music and make it seem ridiculous to future listeners, like reverb-saturated snares date songs as being from the 80s, and “we built this city…” dates songs as being from a period with terrible taste.

5. Leave your shitty bonus tracks and shitty remixes on the cutting room floor. Stop using them as an excuse to release the same album three times.

6. You might not like the music you made as a child, but it has earned you millions of dollars, which should help dry the tears. And statements like “this is my first real album” are unwise, especially when said album is crappier and more boring than your past ones.

7. If your list of “urban” producers and songwriters looks more like the membership rolls of the Eight Tray Gangster Crips, maybe it’s time to dial back a bit.

8. If all the discussion about you revolves around your shocking antics and your “mature image”, it’s time to quit music and become a porn star, because that’s what people are really paying to see.