Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
From first crashing note to last thunderous moment, Helloween’s latest album, Straight Out Of Hell, is a reminder of the band’s early glory days of Germanic story telling that rivalled the Brothers Grimm in its ability to take a simple idea and give it such intensity and such power that the only clear rivals the metal group were either in the U.K. or in America.
When listeners consider the semi muddled past and fluctuating line up over their career, it is not impossible to think that this could have killed of lesser bands; however when you have a story to tell, nothing should ever get in its way, not line up changes and certainly not changing musical tastes.
When the band first bought out Walls Of Jericho in 1985, the band have had mixed fortunes. The career highs of the exceptional Keeper of The Seven Keys Parts One and Two and Better Than Raw were physically and musically sublime. This new album joins the ranks of those career defining albums and steers away from the desperate lows the group suffered with the loss of key members and personal loss within the framework of the group.
Straight Out Of Hell focuses on the ability of the narrative, that stable of folklore that makes them such a good listen. To take subjects as diverse as lost and seemingly mythical cities, the profit of waging war and man acting as God takes incredible imagination and that is something that this band has in abundance. Not every germ of an idea works but those that flower and blossom are songs that burn into the heart of good Heavy Metal and leaves the much loved band’s pumpkin symbol firmly entrenched once more in the pantheon of great Metal.
Songs such as the opening track of Nabataea and its look at the lost city of Petra, the disturbing Wanna Be God, Burning Sun, Church Breaks Down and the electrifying Asshole all make this album an early contender for metal album of the year.
A storming return for the band from Germany, easily matches the classics of Keeper Of The Seven Keys and dominant in its sound.
Ian D. Hall