In 2003, we enter what you’d call “late Helloween”—the Sasha Gerstner era.

It marks the point where my relationship with this band shifts from “unalloyed love” to an attitude more more careful and critical, more keenly aware of flaws. On paper, albums like 2007’s Gambling With the Devil and 2010’s Seven Sinners are really strong. They have many good parts! So why do I feel at arms’ length from them? They’re really subtly off. Something’s missing; or something’s present that shouldn’t be there. They’re made by a band that doesn’t feel like Helloween anymore.

I don’t listen to modern Helloween as much as the Walls of Jericho to Keeper II classic run, or the renaissance of Master of the Rings to The Dark Ride, but I would say I listen to their newer album harder, trying to pinpoint the source of my emotional discontent.

2003’s Rabbit Don’t Come Easy is easier to discuss. Blatantly weak, it might be the second or third crappiest Helloween album, and that’s a problem, because Chameleon safely locks up the title for first.

Many have described it as another Pink Bubbles Go Ape. Not quite. It has a stupid title, a stupid cover, emerged as a response to a lineup change, and a sense of being an inferior “we have Helloween at home” substitute. But the reason for its issues couldn’t be more different. Bubbles had a singer who didn’t want to be in a metal band and who was trying to change the band into the Beatles. Rabbit was made by the broken pieces of a band, just trying to exist, desperately still trying to be Helloween. “A band trying too hard to be themselves” is implicitly an admission that the band is no longer themselves, which is exactly the case here, as one of the most brutal lineup shifts in the band’s history had just occurred.

In 2001, guitarist Roland Grapow was fired and replaced with Freedom Call guitarist Sasha Gerstner. Drummer Uli Kusch was also fired and replaced with basically half the drummers inside the Schengen Area. Two drummers are credited on the record—Motorhead’s Mikkey Dee, and At Vance’s Mark Cross—and by the time the record came out they were working with a third drummer, Accept/UDO’s Stefan Schwarzmann. The final drummer was the (excellent) Dani Loble, who remains with the band to this day.

Caught by the chaos of lineup changes, dealing with the aftershocks of an experiment that their label hadn’t liked (2000’s The Dark Ride) Helloween overcorrected here, becoming a silly, excessive parody of themselves.

Andi Deris shoulders the bulk of the songwriting. As usual, he’s responsible for both highlights and lowlights. Grosskopf (who never really wrote much of note before then) rallies and delivers what might be the standout song. The other members just kind of futz around. Gerstner delivers some good work. Weikath has no idea what he’s doing.

“Just A Little Sign” and “The Tune” (by Deris and Weikath, respectively) are bland fast songs that wash off me like water. They’re so flowery and trite they make “All Over the Nations” look like Walls of Jericho. Just nothing Helloweeney about them at all. “Something’s growing in my pants / As she looks into my eyes”. Great lyrics to start the album off with. Where’s Mr Torture when you need him?

They also highlight a pretty questionable production job by Charlie Bauerfiend. He overproduces the fuck out of Rabbit, . The guitar tone is heavily-processed and lacks bite. The drums have a fake, digital quality that almost sounds programmed—the kick drums have the overly present, clicky character of early Sonata Arctica.

Other songs, like “Sun 4 The World” tend to be meager, uninteresting, and mired in overbearing production and excessive double-bass drumming. “Never Be A Star” was apparently written in the “Perfect Gentleman” days. Not much to say about it. It’s barely adequate as filler.

“Nothing To Say” is an overlong dad-rock song with a skank beat in the pre-chorus (?!). What the fuck? “Helloween should not play ska” is the type of thought you expect you’ll go a whole lifetime without thinking, and here Michael Weikath is inflicting it on me at the tender age of 36.

He also contributes “Back Against the Wall”: an obvious leftover from The Dark Ride sessions that makes no sense whatsoever. Angsty, dark, mallgothy. It would have been the worst song on The Dark Ride. Here, it’s just a bit below average.

Having complained about Rabbit a fair bit, is there anything good about the record? Yes. Two songs more or less redeem it on their own.

The first is “Open Your Life”. Despite the flawed production and flower metal influences, it’s amazingly catchy. Sasha Gerstner has a writing credit on it. That’s another parallel point that could be drawn with Pink Bubbles Go Ape. The best song on that album was written by the new guitarist (Roland Grapow), too.

The second is Markus Grosskopf’s “Hell Was Made In Heaven”, which has such a crushing heft and energy to it. I think I have listened to this song on its own more than the rest of the songs combined.

Most of the tracks come across as desperate and calculated, bereft of great ideas, but possessed with a burning need to be Helloween. Again, Halloween as a parody of themselves. That said, there are one or two risks here, and these bomb pretty hard. So I’m not sure what they should have done.

One of the things I’d say about Rabbit Don’t Come Easy (and nu Helloween more generally). It sounds heavily like a fan‘s conception of what Helloween should sound like. That’s not a de facto bad thing. It is, however, a dangerous thing. Fans don’t know shit. Fans want a band to freeze themselves in amber, remaining the same forever. A fan of Walls of Jericho wouldn’t have wanted Kiske to join the band. A fan of Keeper of the Seven Keys I and II wouldn’t have wanted Kiske to ever leave, not even when he was clearly poisoning things. Bands that overly pander to their fans risk becoming a nostalgia act, irrelevant and absurd to anyone who’s not a fan.

I won’t say “fuck the fans”. I will say “half-fuck the fans”. Ultimately, the band’s artistic drive should come from within, not from whatever placard-wielding contingency is making the most noise in their fan club or street team. Fans are the result of a compelling creative vision. They aren’t—and should never be mistaken for—the source of that vision. The horse must go before the cart.

The end of an era. Helloween’s Y2K album is the last to feature the second “classic” lineup of Weikath/Deris/Grosskopf/Grapow/Kusch. It marks a turning point: post-The Dark Ride, Helloween becomes, though not bad, more streamlined, less risk-averse, and (in my view) less interesting.

To dispatch with the obvious, no, this isn’t “nu metal” Helloween. It has some downtuned, tonally dark songs, but they mostly seem patterned after Dio/Martin-era Black Sabbath more than, say Korn.

It’s definitely confused. I’ll say that much. The band doesn’t fully commit to their new, dark style, writing a bunch of classic-style songs as well, turning the album into a bit of a patchwork. The Dark Ride is an odd, contradictory amphibian of an album that seems to exist in the sunlight and under the starless sky at the same time, with the tracklisting throwing every tonal mismatch into sharp relief. You have basically the floweriest song ever written under the Helloween imprimature (“All Over the Nations”) right next to arguably the darkest one (“Escalation 666”). “Mr Torture” is a perfect opening, “The Dark Ride” a perfect closer, but otherwise you could jumble the songs at random and get a more cohesive listening experience.

Grapow/Kusch really start driving the band here—to their detriment, as creative conflicts would soon lead to them being ousted (Grapow, 2005: “We weren’t really a band anymore and struggled with tons of issues along the way, it was best for us to leave and aim for new goals.”). They write a ton of songs, and according to Grapow, virtually all the guitar work here is his. At the same time, they were also amassing some songs that never made the album, and were later featured on the debut album of their next band, Masterplan. (You can really imagine “Into the Light” on this album, being sung by Deris.)

Kusch’s “Mr Torture” is one of the all-time Helloween opening songs. Punchy, tight, catchy, accessible, it rolls and bounces along, verses propelled by jagged runs of double-bass, the chorus opening wide up, and the bridge illuminated by a short but flashy Grapow guitar solo that lights the song on fire. Great track.

The lyrics are pretty weird, portraying some kind of…torture entrepeneur? “You can catch him on his website / Has a live chat every weeknight / Cyber-torture soon coming your way!” Well, it wouldn’t be a year 2000 album without gratuitous internet references, I suppose. (Viz Britney Spears’ “Email My Heart”)

Then Weikath’s “All Over the Nations” arrives: a fast, melodic, somewhat generic power metal track, it sounds literally nothing like the preceding or following song. Other than Deris’s vocals and Roy Z’s murky but textured production (which proves to be the glue holding The Dark Ride‘s disparate shards together), you wouldn’t even think this and “Mr Torture” were from the same album. Not offensive, but definitely a bit lightweight and “Helloween done by committee”.

Two things are noticeable about The Dark Ride: first, it’s really, really good. Possibly superior to Better than Raw, which might make it the best Helloween album ever, aside from Walls of Jericho and The Keepers.

Second, the different songwriters are really, really, really not on the same page anymore. Grapow and Kusch want darkness, Weikath stubbornly cleaves to the “happy happy Helloween” template, and Deris has a foot in both camps. Markus Grosskopf sticks to playing bass, and doesn’t write a song this time (although his composition “Deliver Us” appears on various bonus editions, and suggests he was of one mind with the Grapow/Kusch contingent.)

Grapow’s “Escalation 666” is one of the band’s most crushing and experimental tracks. A doom metal paced trudge through some inner mindscape of madness, it’s not a song, it’s a black hole yawning at the album’s core. The chugging, C-standard (I think?) opening riff sounds supernova-heavy, and the dissonant, effects-laden guitar solo reminds me of “Bleeding Eyes” off that first Masterplan album. It’s not the greatest song on the album, but it’s never far from my thoughts.

Andi Deris proves to be hit or miss like usual, writing two certified classics (the piano-driven single “If I Could Fly” and the flighty, foot-on-the-gas adventure of “We Damn the Night”) and two stinkers. “Mirror Mirror” and “I Live For Your Pain” are just chuggy, downtuned nothingburgers with mediocre ideas and no sense of catchiness or energy. Skip-button fodder. Like Helloween trying to be a grunge rock band or something.

His bonus track “Madness of the Crowds” is a fascinating “one idea” type song, pairing quiet verses with explosive choruses (and some intriguing knifing symphonic stabs). “Immortal” is the closest we have to a torch ballad. Not bad, but a bit slender when compared with Kusch’s “The Departed”, which we just heard a few minutes earlier.

The album concludes with Grapow’s “The Dark Ride”, a monolithic speed epic that’s like a tombstone for this era of the band. Beginning with the (somewhat stale) motif of amusement park sounds, it’s a bit long, but when the ideas come, they really come. Grapow really loves octave-skipping tremolo riffs (like in the pre-chorus: “Out of doubt, no hope / Satan feeds our madness”), but so do I. The guitar solo section is just straight-up Yngwie Malmsteen worship. Some of the last he ever did.

This is one of those spikey albums where the flaws are evident but the strengths are so good that even if I’m bitching about it half the time, I still love it. This is an incredibly special and important record to me. One last triumph of power metal before Y2K shut the world down.

Walt Disney’s career as a director of animated film was not a particularly inspiring one.

We’ll ignore the Laugh-O-Grams and Alice Comedies since those were cranked out under Stakhanovite conditions for nearly no money for men who often turned out to be literal criminals (Pat Sullivan has a borderline classic Wikipedia page, littered with lines like “Sulivan(sic) would often fire employees in a drunken haze, not remembering the next day, when they would return to work as if nothing had happened“, and a Controversies section split into subheadings “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”).

We’ll also ignore early output like 1921’s Kansas City Girls Are Rolling Their Own Now, which mainly serve as insight into fetishes Walt may have had.

Yes, “Steamboat Willie” and “Skeleton Dance” and “Hell’s Bells” and “The Problematically-Depicted Negro” (etc) are holy classics, but Ub Iwerks (and his hunger for violence) deserve a lot of credit for those. Probably more than he got or will ever get, even by me. “Poor Papa” is great and underrated. “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo” sucks. Etc. More misses than hits, by my lights.

On the whole, you would describe Disney’s directorial output as “stiff, stagey, and moralistic.” You would not describe it as “very fun”. He did not make animation sing. He made it squawk, fret, and preach. His skills were adequate for the rubber hose era. By the 1930s, cartoons were entering their golden years, rapidly exploding in complexity, detail and quality of writing/acting/etc. Walt ended up over his head, his aged and dating skillset like racing a Model T at the Indy 500.

“The Golden Touch” (1935) was famously the result of a bet that Walt couldn’t direct as well as his animators: a bet that his animators immediately and decisively won. The last animated short ever directed by the man behind the mouse, it’s somewhat watchable, but most of the fun parts—like Midas giving himself a gangsterish gold tooth—feel like they were added by animators to try and punch life into things.

The story is flat and predictable and preachy. Don’t be greedy! Even if you don’t know who King Midas is, you can guess the plot after thirty seconds. Countless opportunities for gags are missed. King Midas spends half the short sitting in a chair. And when Goldie grants Midas the Golden Touch, shouldn’t he do it in a funny or interesting way? Instead of just saying “you have the Golden Touch now!” (or something) and disappearing?

I liked the skeleton. I wonder if that came from Walt. I expect it did. He always had an eye for the morbid.

What was Walt good at? I see him as a visionary and a dreamer who made audacious technical bets (synchronized sound, Technicolor, feature-length films), re-imagined the concept of what a cartoon could be, and then found talented artists to execute his vision. He wasn’t much of an artist himself, but that’s okay. There’s the big picture and the small picture. Georgy Zhukov was a talented general on the Eastern Front, but I could probably beat him at kickboxing—him dying in 1974 helps.