loading...You’ll Likely Never Own This, Either - 82%
Never been a huge Helloween fan for some reason. I don’t know, maybe I’ll use this as an incentive to really get into their early stuff, which I never had a huge problem with to anyway. Guess I just started with a bad album (Rabbits Don’t Come Easy).
These two tracks are both very serious and showcase hellishly fast riff attacks from Hansen and Weikath. We’re talking twists, turns, racing, and altitude drops from every direction, making for the two fastest songs on the Death Metal split where these two songs were first featured. The lead tone is a little light, but the rhythm tone manages to keep all the power you could provide for an underground band in those days. Bass attempts to fill whatever gaps in air are left in the commotion, and although it was light compared to the other bass tones on the split, it fits perfectly fine here; grumble grumble grumble!
Hansen himself is a tyrant in the wind, howling and wailing in the distance like a madman. Nobody on the split before this can touch his vocals in terms of range – he’s like Kürsch from Blind Guardian where he can get those pissed off vocals down right while also nailing ozone-high screams in a matter of seconds. All his vocals literally sound like they’re hundreds of feet away, but he can still sing loud enough for you to hear him from that far away. Drumming also manages to be strictly heavy at times – assaulting the senses, as I previously mentioned. The patterns are nothing out of the ordinary and only a fraction of the guitars’ speed, but still consistent and raw.
I’d trust my instinct to go check out the debut album by the band. Obviously Helloween would get lighter with time (with fluctuations), but they were already lighter than all the bands featured on the split. Still, they were heavier in the sense that their speed and range beat out their peers. Not to mention that the band is still going today ((at the time of writing this review and while also spawning the off-shoot competitors Gamma Ray), so this was just a first run in a long history.
