Death Metal Demo

Here I'm cheating a bit, because what I've listened to is the split with Hellhammer, Running Wild and Dark Avenger, but I just want to talk about Helloween, specifically about the early Helloween era with Kai Hansen as frontman, an era I'm currently very addicted to. My introduction to Helloween was with Keeper part two, and together with the first part they have been, still are and surely will be my go to go of Helloween, that line-up is for me the best they have ever had. Over time I've also been appreciating more and more the long Eris era, plagued by many banger albums if I'm honest, and although it sounds a bit sacrilegious, it was precisely the Walls of Jericho era that didn't convince me until very recently.

The reason why Walls of Jericho era wasn't convincing to me was because of the fact that I stuck only on that album, once I started to delve into the rest of the songs of this early line-up I started to get a taste for it, and this demo is the first example of that, even though the band was young and didn't know the future that awaited them, there was already a certain mastery in songwriting, the Judas Priest and Iron Maiden inspirations are overly obvious from the first moment, but even so both tracks on the demo have enough of their identity to stand out on their own, the band's ability to sound so clear from the first moment is impressive, they manage to be catchy as well as fast and they also manage to be melodic at the same time that the recording gives them a raw touch.

There are many characteristic Helloween elements that are already palpable in these early, simplistic tracks, such as Markus Grosskopf's prominent bass, the triple tempo changes from chorus to bridge to guitar solo and how this solo evolves into a more emotional and melodic one that continues to unfold that melodicism exponentially until it ends. All of these are ideas that would be seen in the following Helloween releases in ever more ambitious compositions. Really, even if what is on this demo is too simple to be too vocal about it, not in vain in that year there were already power/speed bands that were doing more potent and charismatic things, like Queensrÿche, it is impossible to take away the merit of the amount of right things that the band proposed from the very beginning.