What happened to this band, and what are the chances of it unhappening?

Helloween’s latest album has some good songs. Not too many – you won’t need to graft additional digits on to your hands to count them – but they’re there. Yet it doesn’t matter. The magic is gone. What happened to the good old days, when the songwriting was careless and free? Helloween is now an overcalculated parody of itself.

To recap, Helloween’s Keeper of the Seven Keys 1 and 2 established them as a band of huge promise in the late 80s. Speed metal was already desiccating into something dry and unappealing – Helloween sounded fun, colourful, and catchy. They soon moved away from metal and started aping The Beatles, which went over as well as you’d expect.

The band reshuffled its lineup and had a nice little renaissance in the mid 90s, with Roland Grapow on lead guitar and Uli Kusch on drums. Then that lineup collapsed at its high point (The Dark Ride), and the band decided to call it a day. Or so my crack fantasies go. In reality, here we are with yet another not-so-essential power metal album.

It has better production than the last few albums, but that highlights what a meatless meal this is. Most of the songs are simply not good. And even when they are good, they’re an obvious, safe kind of good. Opening track “Nabataea” is one from the latter category, containing a rote progression of effects-laden intro –> Iron Maiden melodies –> Megadeth thrash riff –> etc. Very predictable. You can almost hear the band ticking things off a list.

That song was written by the guy behind the microphone. If you want to talk about The Beatles, Andi Deris is this band’s Paul McCartney. He’s written some of their most powerful and interesting songs (“Before the War”, “The Shade in the Shadow”, “Time”), but also some of their most commercial and irritating (“As Long as I Fall”, “Mrs God”). On this album, he is an outright liability. He contributes five songs, and three of them are hogwash. Firing Deris would not save this band but it would be huge step in the right direction.

The album’s best moments are penned by Michael Weikath. The scorching mini-epic “Burning Sun” and the catchy and nostalgic “Years” are very good songs, I keep coming back to them even after I’ve forgotten what’s on the rest of this disc. In the Keeper era, Weikath was the band’s weak link. Now he embodies everything that’s still good about this band.

Grosskopf still has his highly active basslines, and Sascha Gerstner makes a fairly good lead guitarist (Roland cannot be substituted for.) I don’t know why I dislike Daniel Löble’s drumming. Maybe it’s the overloud cymbals, maybe it’s his fill-heavy style that tries to make the music all about him. Competent musicianship all around.

But competent musicianship doesn’t mean competent music. Straight out of Hell is boring and crappy. Didn’t they realise that nobody wants to hear “We Will Rock You” by Queen ever again, and that rewriting it into a 2 minute joke song called “Wanna Be God” is gilding a venereal lily? Didn’t they realise that three of these songs (“Far Beyond the Stars”, “Make Fire Catch the Fly”, and “Church Breaks Down”) have the exact same chorus? Didn’t they realise they should have broken up years ago?

This is an album by Creation Books founder James Williamson under his pen name James Havoc (the guy who gets killed and brought back to life every time there’s a cash cow to milk). It is based on Raism, a rather extreme novella written in chaotic pseudoprose, and Church of Raism aims to be music to the same effect. It aims, but doesn’t hit.

Church of Raism only wants to be irritating noise, but James Havoc isn’t good enough at making irritating noise. Chaos can be interesting if it’s controlled chaos (a paradox?) – marshalled and micromanaged by an expert. This, unfortunately, is the other sort: a person who lacks talent and thinks impulsive spasms of creativity are a substitute.

“Death to Pussycat” sets the tone, dissonant rhythms snaking out of a sea of fuzz and what sounds like a Donald Duck cartoon. “Caustic Descent” has Havoc reading some of his writing (“an anal pact with demons…”) in the voice of a page boy who has been lectured to mind his manners, and the effect is unintentionally comic.

“Night Scar” has female vox and acoustic guitar playing and lots of distorted noise – if you liked the early White Zombie albums you’d dig parts of this, it’s definitely influenced by 80s noise rock. The other songs stick to a similar formula: destructive noise juxtaposed with spoken word sections and incongruous shards of melody.

There’s not much thought put into anything here, that’s my principle complaint. Everything sounds random and witless. There will shortly be computer algorithms capable of making albums like Church of Raism. This isn’t a horrifying look into the mind of a madman. It’s a horrifying look into the mind of someone fiddling with discount recording gear he bought at Fisher and Paykel.

The final song is “Ditchfinder”. “The cunt of the night is bled into my mouth…” oh, shut up. 11 minutes? Seriously? I have to listen to this for 11 minutes? Can’t I go outside and be a productive citizen?

Havoc is a far better writer than he is a musician. In print, he is often forceful and disturbing. In audio, he sounds more like a child let loose at a mixing desk. Havoc was “in tight” with a few big boys in the UK indie scene – Primal Scream and Creation Records’ Alan McGee – and Church of Raism probably got more of a push than it was intended to get.

These days, the internet has restored it to its rightful place in the food chain: an EP-length musical experiment that Creation fans will check out once and will maybe check out twice but will probably not check out a third time.

Black metal should have stopped here. Welcome to Hell is nasty, vituperative, and evil, but lots of bands have copied its tricks over the years, usually without adding anything to them, and the result is one of metal’s more annoying subgenres. Welcome to Hell is a comedian delivering a punch-line. Modern black metal is that same comedian rambling on uselessly after he’s gotten his big laugh.

It has overdistorted guitars, a bass tone that sounds like a metal bat being destroyed by an angle grinder, and lyrics about satanism etc delivered in a self-conscious, humorous way. Venom don’t take themselves very seriously, unlike most of the bands they’ve inspired. All they do here is rock out and have fun.

Some bands have songwriting, but Venom has something more akin to songscribbling or songdoodling. None of them know a single damn thing about music, they’re all just making it up as they go along. As a result, they ignore a lot of common sense songwriting tricks. The title track begins with That Omnipresent Metal Riff (“Flash Rocking Man” by Accept, “Overnight Sensation” by Motorhead, “Fly to the Rainbow” by At Vance, “2 Minutes to Midnight” by Iron Maiden, “Midnight Chaser” by White Spirit, hundreds of others) and it sounds groovy and catchy rather than agitated, which makes the sudden resolution of the chorus feel a bit unearned. This kind of chorus is meant to dissipate tension, only here there’s no tension to dissipate – and it strikes the ear as odd. Yet, it’s an interesting effect. The way Conrad Lant and friends ignore the rulebook is part of the album’s appeal.

Most of the songs are constructed like punk rock: blisteringly fast, with as few riffs as possible, and a vocal performance that has energy and power to commend it. “One Thousand Days in Sodom” and “In League With Satan” break up the speed with an excruciating mid-tempo burn, but they are equally destructive and chaotic. Some of the songs don’t sound particularly memorable, but the impression Welcome to Hell leaves is of 39 minutes of unstoppable momentum. This album’s an irresistible force, so where’s an immovable object?

Welcome to Hell’s raw aesthetic might not have been intentional. The album was recorded in just three days, ostensibly as a demo, but the label made the decision to release it as an album, using a drawing of Conrad’s that had been used as a previous single cover.

But that too might be more power to Venom’s elbow, that they got an album out as quickly as they did. Venom’s 1981 release date is powerful cachet. A 1982 or 1983 release date would take them uncomfortably close to Slayer, and Sodom, to say nothing of Bathory (what would those bands have sounded like without Venom’s influence, though?)

Black metal is a self-loathing genre filled with people who take pride in making shitty music nobody likes and nobody listens to, but it wasn’t always this way, and Venom proves it.