The Formative Years

Helloween

As prepubescent in the late 1980s, there was a German heavy metal band that ruled my world long before I endeavoured to get lost in the world of extreme music.

I must have been nine when I was gifted Helloween’s Walls of Jericho album and it instantaneously blew my mind – the artwork, the tight and intricate musicianship, the theatrical vocals with the unrivalled stability on those insanely high soaring notes, the effortlessness of delivery and the fact that a band like that emerged from Germany. 

I was hooked.

What followed was a massive step up: Helloween’s two epic concept albums centred around fantasy stories, i.e. Keeper of the Seven Keys part 1 and 2. What was initially planned to be a double album but then split in two parts as it was perceived to be too ambitious by the label, became a major success.

With a new vocalist who was by the time of recording merely nine years older than me, the two album do not merely mark a turning point in the band’s history and departure from Helloween’s accomplished speed metal roots, but it deliberately  ventures into melodic territory and is widely heralded as one of the first albums that would define a new genre going by the moniker power metal.

Sound-, lyric, artwork- and music-wise Keeper of the Seven Keys within the context of its time felt like a ground-breaking, new self-contained cosmos that the band confidently sculpted to push the envelope in every direction.

Epic, progressive and mystic in equal measure, the two Keeper of the Seven Keys albums create a unique atmosphere and make them a fun listen to this day due to the heavy riffing, catchy (pre-)choruses, melodic guitars with dominant virtuosic and inspired soli taking up a disproportionate amount of real estate on the masterful recordings, which expertly change atmospheres throughout from reassuring to horrific and everything in between not unlike a well-executed movie with a nuanced storyline.

Looking back, it is not further wondrous that both albums kicked the doors open for Helloween to become a Teutonic success story, which saw them not only tour with Iron Maiden, play Monsters of Rock, tour successfully all over the world and eventual being graced with airplay on MTV’s Headbangers Ball.

Curiously enough, the sentiment of their single I Want Out not only reflected my outlook on the world at that time, but catapulted me into the exploration of heavier and more extreme music.