Anatomia DEU: Helloween

 

 

Poprzednio było tylko po polsku, to teraz będzie tylko po angielsku, bo mi się nie chce tłumaczyć. Już taka ze mnie leniwa buła. Albo pieróg.

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It's Halloween, or Dziady (as we call it here, where I live and belong), so who would be a better guest than... Helloween? Yeah, I'm that imaginative, no need for applause. This blog is actually dedicated more to NEKRO METAL, and Power Metal is really faar far away from that style. But then again, sometimes you have to break the rules, just to make the point about their poignancy.

However, it's not completely separated from what I usually prefer to write about, as after all, Helloween DID appear on the infamous Split album with Hellhammer, Dark Avenger (who?) and Running Wild, which was called "DEATH METAL" nonetheless. See, this is my wit working.

But instead of gushing about their classic works, I'd prefer to keep it personal, as usual. The album in question, which you can see above, is their ninth album, "The Dark Ride", which was released back in 2000, albeit I hadn't heard this album until like 3/4 years later. Back then, I was still in my Alt Metal / Grunge / Led Zeppelin / Metallica phase, and I wasn't quite ready for the extreme stuff.

A friend of mine, the very same that I actually introduced to heavier music, very quickly started to one-up me with the new bands he was discovering on a daily basis, thanks to his cousins' massive tape collection and mp3s. Eventually, he presented to me his latest discovery, which was a song called "If I Could Fly" of this very band. It was quite a catchy song (to this day I still like it). It had the mainstream appeal of chorus-verse-chorus structure, but it also had a... Power in it. I was a kid back then, so I obviously did not understand the difference between genres, everything was still new for me.

But I liked that song well enough that my friend burned a CD copy of that album. And that was my first exposure to Helloween. Pretty soon afterwards I saw in the store their back-then newest album "Rabbit Don't Come Easy", but somehow, I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to get it, as I was already moving onto something else. Over a decade later, I would  actually finally acquaint myself with their whole output, but somehow, it never really connected to me like "The Dark Ride", which I was listening on repeat back in 2003. But that's the eternal magic of your first crush.

Memories aside, Helloween is actually highly representative of the MAIN German style. You see, Germany is something of a capital of Metal, as majority of the genres had their beginning there (with a little help from UK), but while bands like Kreator or Sodom would inspire countless of Death / Black Metal bands worldwide, their homeland would actually prefer a music more in vein of Accept, Blind Guardian, Running Wild, and from overseas, Manowar and Iced Earth. Heavy / Power Metal is the preferred genre in Germany, and I myself was surprised how the Krauts shun their more extreme output in favor for sing-a-long, highly melodic, inoffensive anthems about castles, dragons, pirates, but never graveyards, necromancers, zombies, or ghouls.

In this regard, Helloween fits the German taste like a leather glove. That doesn't mean that it's a bad band of course, quite the opposite, but rather, that Germany lives in their own small world, being totally clueless about what is actually popular everywhere else. Bah, there is also a very old, but still active website (metaleros.de), which even spells out what it considers REAL Metal, and what is in their opinion a garbage noise. Feel free to take an educated guess. It certainly is eye-opening for sure.

But for those, who only care about the early Helloween, and not much else, I do recommend trying "The Dark Ride". It's a very fun and capable album, and a testament to the songwriting skills of the band, which in my opinion, never waned. There aren't that many bands, who are still capable of writing a good song on their ninth album, let alone an actual hit. And maybe that's why I feel to call Helloween a honorary guest of this prestiguous, exclusive, tip-top-hit, VIP blog. Thank you and go trick or treat or sth, while I will do my pagan rituals to invoke my ancestors' spirits.